Transcoding anything >720p is painful.
I run ancient hardware for desktop/laptop >10yrs old apple stuff running linux. I consume media mainly via rpi4 or android.
What’s a minimum level system capable of trans-coding 4k video to x265 in at the very least real time? Is there a tiny trans-coding device out there somewhere?
Would a NUC do? How old or new to churn out 4k x265
Can I avoid hardware? Are cloud gpu’s a thing?
If time is not a consideration just batch up transcodes with your shitty hardware and nice/renice the process out of the way.
It seems unreasonable with the hardware, even with nice things.
I run Gentoo, with lots of binaries, on my 2011 iMac just fine but encoding HD video on it feels like abuse.
As the other person said, NUCs and such are able to do transcodes via Intel QuickSync hardware acceleration, it’s not really possible to transcode 4k in realtime on most CPUs without it.
You will need at least an 8th gen Intel processor to do HVEC which is what h265 uses, more info is in this chart on Wikipedia about which generations support which things. Anecdotally, this has worked extremely well for me for a long time, definitely worth it.
Also be aware if you are doing any virtualization you will need to pass the iGPU through to the guest machine.
Sorry, you need hardware.
If you are doing a ton of encoding, you could even get specialized hardware like amd alevo (spelling?) card which enables you to encode even AV1.
That being said, what are you doing that requires you to encode h.265 on ancient hardware?
I’m using a 2011 imac & 2010 macbook pro as my main devices. I have an rpi4 as a little media center & personal server.
2160p x265 looks great on the pi, 2160p x264 is grim. Encoding 2160p on any of my systems is pain.
Ongoing it would be nice to be able to re-encode the occasional 2160p video faster than a tenth of real time or feeling like I’m overly stressing very old hardware.
Think I may keep an eye out for a 2nd hand nuc, I like small & quiet and I didn’t realize until posting this thread that cpu encoding is preferred to gpu. A nuc would also be nice for some better retro game action than the pi4.
NUC should be fine. I have unmanic running in a container on it converting anything I add to folders.
Besides hardware, here is a tool that will you can sink time into. There is a lot of things to lern.
An intel nuc with an IGPU from the last few generations would do it no problem (even a pentium or i3 from the last few generations would be better than what you have by the sounds of it).
Or you can grab a cheap used quadro p600 or gt1050 (minimum model with hardware H265 NVENC support) and use that for transcoding or run an app like tdarr, unmanic or fileflows to convert your library to a direct streamable format in the background.
Why are you even requiring transcode is also something to look at, you should be trying to get your playback devices to play the raw files directly, that means a solid network infrastructure and properly configured software. If they are physically incapable of playing your 4k media then you need to look at upgrading them.
This all applies whether you are running plex, jellyfin, emby or whatever else.
Cloud GPUs are a thing, but they’re very expensive.
it depends, they break even if you run them for many hours a day, but for smaller / quicker workloads they can make a lot of sense
It’s hard to beat a GPU in HEVC encoding performance. SoC:s have comparable performance to dGPU:s in that regard. A used zen/zen2 laptop might be a cheap and tiny workhorse for the purpose. I have a zen/vega10 matebook 2020 that does 1080p at around 2.5-3x real-time at high quality presets. No doubt it could do 4k at faster presets.
With the hardware in my arsenal I’ve found that AMD>Intel>nVidia, at least quality wise. VideoToolbox on Mac is down there with nVidia, and Apple silicon being pretty slow at it compared to software x265 on the same machine.
I would recommend trying to rent a vps for just long enough to transcode and using that. It would be way cheaper than buying new hardware.
