I try to solve the problem that the cpu isn’t powerful enough wheras my gpu isn’t supported and I need a new one and I want to have a seemless experience.
I’m using nvidia right now with a 3060. It doesnt use much power, I got it for pretty cheap on ebay, and it encodes/decodes everything except for av1 encoding which I dont have use for. Looking at the charts in the link below, if you need to encode av1 you’ld need a 4000 series.
I’ve found nvidia to work pretty well for jellyfin, I use docker with the nvidia container toolkit and it just worked with hardware encoding out of the gate. I also have some other docker containers running gen ai and the 3060 handles them well as long as the modle will fit in vram.
I think it entirely depends on your use case and hardware. I have a rack server, I need the extra power relatively frequently, as well as the 16x 2.5" bays and the 4 NICs. A rack server is a fairly power efficient package to get all those features in. However, it means that I am limited to discrete graphics, as Xeons don’t have Intel QSV. There’s also no monitor connected, and no 3D rendering happening, so the card is gonna idle at >5W and probably only use 20-30W while transcoding. Compared to a system that’s idling at ~250W that’s nothing.
The most impressed I’ve been with hardware encoding and decoding is with the built in graphics on my little NUC.
I’m using a NUC10i5FNH which was only barely able to transcode one vaguely decent bitrate stream in software. It looked like passing the hardware transcoding through to a VM was too messy for me so I decided to reinstall linux straight on the hardware.
The hardware encoding and decoding performance was absolutely amazing. I must have opened up about 20 jellyfin windows that were transcoding before I gave up trying and called it good enough. I only really need about 4 maximum.
The graphics on the 10th generation NUC’s is the same sort of thing that is on the 9th gen and 10th gen desktop cpu’s, so if you have and intel cpu with onboard graphics give it a try.
It’s way less trouble than the last time I built a similar setup with NVidia. I haven’t tried a Radeon card yet, but the jellyfin docs are a bit more negative about AMD.
I didn’t even know jellyfin had hw transcode till this post but I’m with this guy, Intel’s qsv is great. I have my plex server running bare metal on an gen 2 HP chromebox. It’s dual core but hw transcode with Intel QSV will do like 20+ 1080p streams.
Intel integrated graphics is pretty phenomenal for ~5 user HTPC setups and NUC’s are basically the best Intel products ever. Nothing better than it just working out of the box.
This. I used a P1000 for transcoding and eventually switched to a 12th gen Intel chip with integrated UHD 770 graphics. It completely blew me away. Insanely low power draw and barely breaks a sweat transcoding multiple streams. Consider this route over a GPU if you can.
I’d look into AV1 decoding benchmarks, regardless of NVIDIA vs AMD, as I’ve been using NVIDIA on Jellyfin for a while with no issues.
HEVC is not as relevant IMO, as it’s not available through browsers due to license restrictions (ffmpeg / mpv works fine), so I’d focus on AV1 capabilities, which is not available in many cards.
AV1 decode is supported on the RTX 3000 series, encode + decode in the RTX 4000 series
For Intel Arc, AV1 encode + decode support is present on all Arc Alchemist GPUs,
For AMD, AV1 decode is on RX 6000 series, encode + decode on all RX 7000 series GPUs
As someone else has recommended, a low end Intel Arc alchemist GPU is pretty great for stuff like Jellyfin, very low price to entry for gfx accelerated AV1 transcoding.
The nvidia 1650 can’t do AV1 but it can handle hevc just fine, I’m currently using a 1660 on mine and before that it was a 950. Unless you need more than 3 steams at a time you should be able to get it working.
I hear good things about the Intel Arc A380. You basically only need it to convert video and the Intel is not too bad at that for not too steep a price
Blows the 6950XT and 3090 out of the water in transcoding performance. I would say that is performing very well. That was before drivers have gotten much much better too probably a bigger difference now.
Someone said that it is “not terribly performent” but it doesn’t matter for transcoding. It can do multiple 4k streams of AV1 & HEVC. That is perfect.
According to benchmarks, it beat the 3080 and 6800XT when it was released for transcoding performance. That is what you have to look at in this case, you aren’t gaming on it.
Just remember to enable all of the correct kernel modules to get it working. You often have to manually download the firmware git repo and move it to the firmware folder in Debian to get it working.
And I tried /dev/dri/renderD128 but both don’t work. Moreover, I enabled encoding in HEVC format, hardware encoding and selected hardware accelleration with intel quicksync (QSV) and enabled hardware decoding for H264, HEVC, …
But if that’s enabled, transcoding doesn’t work at all on the player.
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