A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
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?
So I think you may not know about quick sync, an Intel transcoding acceleration feature of Intel gpus in Intel CPUs.
https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/technical/video-qsv.html
There's information about it for I think plex and handbrake and ffmpeg in general. This is how some people do real time transcoding for media servers. But I'm not an expert. I just hope you can be guided with easier search terms.
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.
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.
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.
If you want real time transcoding, then a hardware encoder would be best. Intel CPUs have had hardware H.265 encode support for the last 8 years. Intel ARC GPUs have a very good video encoder, but they require system that supports resizable BAR.
If you just want to transcode a large number of videos for storage, get a system with loads of CPU cores and run multiple transcodes in parallel. Software encoders produce higher quality video than hardware encoders.
There are cloud GPUs, but that gets very expensive, very fast. You are much better off buying your own hardware if you need to use it for a longer period of time.
Thanks
What is resizable BAR?
It improves memory access to the GPU, but I don't believe it's required for Intel ARC anymore.
thx