A few reasons.
For one, storing multiple versions of the same film takes up a lot of storage, which is more expensive than a cheap 40€ gpu for transcoding. And I definitely wanna keep the highest quality I can. Besides transcoding on the fly is more flexible, ensuring the best possible quality at any time, instead of having to pick between the good and the shit version.
And secondly, usually I only need transcoding when I don’t watch on my home setup (or when some friends watch on my server). My upload isn’t as high as some of my film’s bitrates and some clients do not support h.265 or HDR thus needing transcoding and/or tonemapping.
JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 1 month ago
Compatibility and storage.
Do you want only 2 devices of the 10 your family possibly owns to work?
Do you want your family to complain that jellyfin “isn’t as good as Netflix/Disney+/etc…” Because it constantly stops to buffer and a can’t keep up the framerate?
It is completely fine if you are single and have 1-2 devices that work with AV1 and h.265 client side and that is all you need, but then you don’t have to bother with transcoding. When you start letting other people into it, compatibility becomes an issue.
As for storing it beforehand, the entire point of AV1 and HEVC is to significantly reduce the size on disk. If you have to store 10 versions or each file, 5 resolutions each, half h.264, then you are taking up about 20x the space per file compared to 1 copy
A transcode GPU like the A380 or new QSV compatible CPU is MUCH cheaper than a new good quality 12TB drive lol
entropicshart@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Very much agree on all these points; I just wish I could get the transcoding to actually work.
I’ve been running Jellyfin in a container and giving it access to an old GTX970 but it just refuses to do anything with it.
Zeoic@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The 970 unfortunately doesn’t have h265 hardware in it. The only gpu in that generation that does is the 960, as it was released later than the others and was one of the first to get h265. I ended up just getting a p400, and it’s been rock solid.
accideath@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The 970 works for encoding h.264 only. My recommendation: If you have a 7th Gen Intel CPU with iGPU or later, use that. Otherwise, sell the 970 and get one of these (in this order):
The Intel Card has the best encoder, followed by Nvidia Turing, then Pascal. I recently sold my 970 and got a 1050 Ti for the same price. Works great with Jellyfin. If you need to tone map HDR, you probably shouldn’t get anything with much lower performance than that. If it’s just some UHD to HD or h.265 to h.264 for compatibility, even the P400 will work well.
entropicshart@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
thanks for the tips! I am running a Ryzen 9 5950X, so it definitely needs a standalone GPU. I am going to be getting a 1070 off the kids’ computer once I upgrade them later this year, so I think I’ll just stick that into it.
Would really like to get the seamless transcoding to work so the whole family can use it without hiccups.