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. github.com/photoprism/photoprism/…/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.