I kinda feel like old server hardware is key here. I have pretty much my whole lab running on an old R730 I put a bunch of ECC RAM, disks, and a transcode GPU into and it’s been essentially flawless for like 2 years. Plus it has an IPMI which I don’t think I could live without now. It replaced a setup that would always give me issues which consisted of a bunch of optiplexes, and white boxes. I still hack on pi’s cuz it’s fun, but all the core stuff is surplus enterprise.
I recently upgraded my lab, it used to be an R710, and a pair of nodes from a c6100. Because that stuff was so old, I managed to cram all the VMs I was running onto a single FC630 node on a shiny, new (to me) Dell FX2s.
I really want to get a transcoding GPU, but passing out through to a VM has historically been infeasible, and now, it’s complicated at the very least… At least for Nvidia GPUs.
I’ve been looking at the Intel discrete GPU lines for the task recently. I’d sure like to grab a flex 140, but looking at the prices right now, ha, that’s not happening anytime soon. With the FX2s I can only install single-slot half height cards, so options are limited. Front runners right now are the Nvidia P4 and T4, and the Intel ARC A380, with a modded cooler so it’s single slot. My only other option is to find some way to use the existing PCIe interfaces to attach an external GPU, but eGPU enclosures are pretty expensive too and most don’t even come with a GPU.
I’m trying to stay away from thunderbolt, so if I go external, I’ll probably look at either Oculink, or something similar. TB is just way too expensive IMO. I looked into it and the whole setup, a TB PCIe card, TB eGPU enclosure, and a GPU is something like 40-50% more expensive than using a different solution. I’d prefer everything just fits in the server chassis, but then I’m banging my head off of Nvidia or modding Intel ARC cards. None of these are very appealing.
So CPU transcoding for now. I store all my media in 720p AVC/AAC using MP4 as a container, so most streams are direct, and I did that very much on purpose.
Nice! That seems like a sweet little server. Direct play is for sure ideal, plus if 720p is good enough quality for you I’m sure it saves a bunch on disk space.
My set up is an A380 passed to an Ubuntu 24.04 VM on a TrueNAS CORE host. It was really simple to set up PCIe pass through, TrueNAS let’s you do everything you need though the web GUI and h.264 and HEVC transcoding worked right out of the box in Jellyfin with the Jellyfin flavored FFMPEG if I recall. It also supports AV1 encoding but I haven’t tried that out. It handles like a dozen 4k transcodes at once, they’re capable little cards. I think ASRock makes a slot powered low profile 1 slot version.
I kinda feel like old server hardware is key here. I have pretty much my whole lab running on an old R730 I put a bunch of ECC RAM, disks, and a transcode GPU into and it’s been essentially flawless for like 2 years. Plus it has an IPMI which I don’t think I could live without now. It replaced a setup that would always give me issues which consisted of a bunch of optiplexes, and white boxes. I still hack on pi’s cuz it’s fun, but all the core stuff is surplus enterprise.
I recently upgraded my lab, it used to be an R710, and a pair of nodes from a c6100. Because that stuff was so old, I managed to cram all the VMs I was running onto a single FC630 node on a shiny, new (to me) Dell FX2s.
I really want to get a transcoding GPU, but passing out through to a VM has historically been infeasible, and now, it’s complicated at the very least… At least for Nvidia GPUs. I’ve been looking at the Intel discrete GPU lines for the task recently. I’d sure like to grab a flex 140, but looking at the prices right now, ha, that’s not happening anytime soon. With the FX2s I can only install single-slot half height cards, so options are limited. Front runners right now are the Nvidia P4 and T4, and the Intel ARC A380, with a modded cooler so it’s single slot. My only other option is to find some way to use the existing PCIe interfaces to attach an external GPU, but eGPU enclosures are pretty expensive too and most don’t even come with a GPU.
I’m trying to stay away from thunderbolt, so if I go external, I’ll probably look at either Oculink, or something similar. TB is just way too expensive IMO. I looked into it and the whole setup, a TB PCIe card, TB eGPU enclosure, and a GPU is something like 40-50% more expensive than using a different solution. I’d prefer everything just fits in the server chassis, but then I’m banging my head off of Nvidia or modding Intel ARC cards. None of these are very appealing.
So CPU transcoding for now. I store all my media in 720p AVC/AAC using MP4 as a container, so most streams are direct, and I did that very much on purpose.
Nice! That seems like a sweet little server. Direct play is for sure ideal, plus if 720p is good enough quality for you I’m sure it saves a bunch on disk space.
My set up is an A380 passed to an Ubuntu 24.04 VM on a TrueNAS CORE host. It was really simple to set up PCIe pass through, TrueNAS let’s you do everything you need though the web GUI and h.264 and HEVC transcoding worked right out of the box in Jellyfin with the Jellyfin flavored FFMPEG if I recall. It also supports AV1 encoding but I haven’t tried that out. It handles like a dozen 4k transcodes at once, they’re capable little cards. I think ASRock makes a slot powered low profile 1 slot version.