Per my previous post, I’m working on updating my server that’s running a J3455 Celeron with 16gigs of ram.
Goals:
- Support at least six hard drives (currently have six drives in software RAID 6). Can move 7th main drive to nvme.
- Be faster at transcoding video. This is primarily so I can use PhotoPrism for video clips. Real-time transcoding 4K 80mbps video down to something streamabke would be nice. Despite getting QuickSync to work on the Celeron, I can’t pull more than 20fps unless I drop the output to like 640x480. Current build has no PCIe x16 slot.
- Energy efficiency. Trying to avoid a dedicated video card.
- Support more RAM. Currently maxed at 16gb.
- Price: around $500
- Server-grade hardware would be nice, but I want newer versions of quicksync and can’t afford newer server hardware. Motherboard choice is selected primarily because of chipset, number of SATA ports, and I found one open box.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/JX2gHG
Hoping to move my main drive to the NVME and keep the other six drives as-is without needing a reinstall.
Thoughts?
I would not buy a CPU without seeing a real-world measurement of idle total system power consumption if you’re concerned about energy (and therefore cost) efficiency in any way. Especially on desktop platforms where manufacturers historically do not care one bit about efficiency. You could easily spend many hundred € every year if it’s bad. I was not able to find any measurements for that specific CPU.
Be faster at transcoding video. This is primarily so I can use PhotoPrism for video clips. Real-time transcoding 4K 80mbps video down to something streamabke would be nice. Despite getting QuickSync to work on the Celeron, I can’t pull more than 20fps unless I drop the output to like 640x480.
That shouldn’t be the case. I’d look into getting this fixed properly before spending a ton of money for new hardware that you may not actually need. It smells like to me that encode or decode part aren’t actually being done in hardware here.
What codec and pixel format are the source files?
How quickly can you decode them? Try running ffmpeg manually with VAAPI decode,-c copy, and a null sink on the files in question.What codec are you trying to transcode to? Apollo lake can’t encode HEVC 10 bit. Try encoding a testsrc (
testsrc=duration=10:size=3840x2160:rate=30) to AVC 10 bit or HEVC 8 bit.That shouldn’t be the case. I’d look into getting this fixed properly before spending a ton of money for new hardware that you may not actually need. It smells like to me that encode or decode part aren’t actually being done in hardware here.
Right you are!
Dug into it a little more. There were some ffmpeg flags that weren’t being enabled by the latest release of Photoprism. Had to move to the test build. https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/discussions/4093
While it’s faster than real time now, Photoprism still won’t start streaming until the preview is fully generated, so longer video clips can take a minute or two to start playing. It only has to happen once per file, but it’s still annoying. There’s a feature to pre-transcode video, but it’s only to get in to a streamable format. It doesn’t check bitrate/size until you actually start to play.
I might write a script to pre-generate the preview files, but either way, I don’t think I need to upgrade the server quite yet.
Glad I could save you some money :)
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This is a pretty powerful build.
You running VMs on this?
Not yet! But I do have a bunch of different apps running, and I’ve always had to baby it. Looking forward to having more room for activities.
Running media streams too?
Yeah, but we always run them in native formats, so it’s not a big load on the processor. We only watch the 4K stuff at home where it’s got a hardwired gigabit ethernet connection.
If you saw my other comment, I’m kind of talking myself out of this upgrade since I managed to get qsv working on my current rig.
