this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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Does AMD have anything to compete with Intel QSV? I'm looking to upgrade my Plex server and was looking at a newer Intel CPU.
The latest AMD cpus do have transcoding, but Amd transcode isn't very good and isn't very compatible with Linux.
You can pick up an Intel A310 single slot GPU for $100 and it has AV1 encode, which is something that the igpu QSV doesn't have. Works very well in my Epyc motherboard with 76 pcie lanes. I definitely recommend going with an ATX 1st gen Epyc cpu+motherboard if you want something that can do NVMe raid.
It's compatible just fine. But the quality... well, it's not the worst, but definitely not the best quality.
Politely, not the worst compared to what, exactly?
It's way worse than qsv, nvenc, x264 or x265 which are basically the only hardware or cpu options you're likely to run into doing plex transcoding.
I don't have QSV or NVENC hardware to compare, but AMD is perfectly fine in most cases.
I mostly noticed quality drop with very busy scenes and some scene transitions.
Outside of those the quality was acceptable.
I'd say on my setup it's comparable to software encoding with x264 veryfast preset.
And my GPU is 5 years old now, so I'm sure newer cards have improved.
QSV is a very good product, high-quality and efficient. It’s also very mature, lots of signage in large deployments. I’ve tried AMD’s AMF streaming and at lower bit-rates you get a lot more blocking. It’s fine but QSV has an edge.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/827992/tested-intel-arc-av1-video-encoder-vs-nvidia-amd.html
Lower quality at any given bitrate was my experience too. For local stuff it didn't really matter: if I could do 3x the bitrate to get the same quality, then meh, who cares.
If you're streaming/doing shit over the internet/encoding for something like Youtube, though, it's uh, not a good tradeoff because you can't necessarily even make that tradeoff.
I think AMF is still faster/better quality than CPU transcoding, depending on the preset.
That's still an Intel product though...
It's the best option on the market right now and the most compatible one. The drivers are owned by the Linux Foundation, and there are no known hardware bugs with Intel GPUs, unlike with Intel CPUs. You have so much flexibility; Buying an Intel GPU doesn't prevent you from using another CPU, even GPU-less AMD Epyc CPUs that have the cheapest PCIe/$. All you need is a PCIe slot and you get all the benefits of Intel with none of the drawbacks.
I'm a bit of an AMD fanboy sometimes and I own AMD stock, but the A310 can't be beat for Jellyfin transcoding. If you really hate Intel, keep in mind that Intel probably loses money on every GPU they sell 😉
I believe AMD VCN does the same thing. Though I haven't looked into it. AMD chips also have pretty decent onboard video cores, so you might be able to do hardware accelerated encoding that way too.
Just stay away from Intel 13th and 14th gen chips. They have oxidation issues from the factory and are also over-volting themselves. The former is unfixable and the latter causes unfixable damage.
Does laptop cpus have same problems? I've found mixed results.
We don't know and Intel is being incredibly mum about the entire situation.
Which probably means a lot of corporations that have Intel inside their everyday computers may be less than enthusiastic about what they spent money on.
Read somewhere that everything 65W TDP and up is affected. Laptop CPUs should be mostly fine then.
OK, glad to hear this. Thank you. (Also hope it's not another intel's lie.)
IIRC Intel confirmed all Gen13/14 CPUs with 65W TDP or more have the same issues K series do.
OK, thanks for heads up.
You want to look into VCN
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Core_Next
I use the onboard CPU of my ryzen 5600g for my jellyfin and nextcloud (memories app) duties and it works flawless.
I hardly ever transcode at home. I mostly use ffmpeg on a crappy old i5 server that I use for other beataround stuff too. I tend to do that in batch mode and it's fast enough for my purposes. That's an approach to consider. Or you could spin up Intel VM's as needed on Hetzner unless you're doing a totally ridiculous amount of transcoding.
I need on-location transcoding because my internet is garbage (~50 mbps). Sometimes my users need to transcode the show if the bit rate of the file is too high for my internet to keep up.
Wait you're literally serving other users from a home internet? Oh man, get a VM or some colo space or something. Or faster internet. Your internet is much faster than mine and one reason I transcode remotely is to drop the bit rate enough that I can download the transcoded version without waiting all day.
I mean, I can stream 4K HDR if the player supports the video format, but clients don't always jive well with whatever Radarr decided. I know I can fine tune it but everything works well enough right now and I don't have time to change it.
I move around too much to do colocation. A VPS/VM isn't worth the cost to me. My server is all old parts and I don't pay for power usage.
I find software reencoding/remux instead of doing it on the fly is easier for my brain to manage over alignment of the hardware stars.
Eh... I will probably go with a used 9th or 10th gen i7 or something. Intel still gets no money and I get a good CPU.
That's true as well. I'm using an older 7th gen Intel for remuxing, but do software AV1 encodes which take like 11 hours lol