Those running Jellyfin or Plex in your homelab, what GPU are you guys using?
I am planning to source an Intel Arc A310 from a friend in US, given its price and performance in general with streaming. Any advice if I should explore an alternate.
iGPU is out of question, i am running a Xeon server
Well honestly an iGPU would be the best, but since that is out of the question an A310 should be the next best option honestly since it can also handle AV1 natively.
I’ve been eying a Sparkle A310 Eco myself since both the performance and form factor are great for my use case.
Have you evaluated if you really need a GPU for your setup ? If you have mostly modern clients (Chromecasts, Android TV) then it wouldn’t make sense to invest in GPU.
A310 is the best for the price since it has both AV1 enc/dec. If you want Cuda (for Immich/etc), then you might have to look for something like RTX 3050 Low Profile cards (but you’ll miss out the AV1 encode, only decode.. but can do AV1->HEVC just fine).. the latter too doesn’t need a PCIe power connector.
Quicksync and AV1 decode (or encode) was the reason behind exploring it. hopefully I can get my hands on it soon
Then Intel ARC is the only option, I would say. How much does a A310 cost in US?
Last listing I saw was around 12k INR
Not using any GPU. Relying on client device for decoding.
Transcoding was a thing back in the day when file storage was limited and codec support on device was restricted. Right now don’t see much of a reason to have a GPU-based HTPC setup.
Any AV1 encoded content is generally not better in quality, just has a smaller file size which doesn’t matter much if you are not storage limited. Most originally published content are not in AV1 either.
Im running Nvidia T600, i keep my media in H.265 HEVC codec. (using Unmanic to transcode media as soon its added to the library). It also handles Frigate NVR with 12camera including face detection (object detection using Google Coral TPU). I also have Immich running.
I wanted to get the RTX5050/9060XT/B570 since no one is selling A310 in India for AV1 but i dont see the benefit for it right now as others have mentioned almost all modern device supports HEVC and AV1 decoding.
I’m running jellyfin on an intel n100 in a mini pc without any major issues (quicksync enabled).
But if you can get a310 or a380 for cheap then why not.
I have a few questions if you don’t mind.
I’m planning to cohost adguard, nvr with face detection (2 cctvs) and plex server (optional) in one box. Haven’t figured out requirements yet. Is an AMD GX-420GI APU sufficient for this?
Been using jellyfin from past 6.months..
Hosting a bunch of files on an ex drive connected to one of my hp elitedesk..
Streaming to my tv which natively support hevc av1, avc and avi etc
I have disabled the transcoding options wherever I have found them in the jellyfin server but still while streaming the cpu usage is high with fgmpeg using most of it which only means transcoding is still happening.
This is driving me nuts as there is no need of itvl, all files are already hevc coded
Are you hosting these as service or containers?
GPU shows only 10%, what’s the avg usage?
This would depends on the how many con-current streams are running at a time, i have played upto 3-4 4k streams at a time without any issues.
My Unmanic profile for ‘converting everything to HEVC’ uses 100% of my GPU when it runs but it only happens when new media is found.
Frigate is running 24x7 so the 10% you see is that. Coral TPU offloads the motion detection work from the CPU otherwise CPU would be going crazy.
I’m planning to cohost adguard, nvr with face detection (2 cctvs) and plex server (optional) in one box. Haven’t figured out requirements yet. Is an AMD GX-420GI APU sufficient for this?
This is basically one cd/cd pipeline away from feeling like a real prod setup in a startup lol.
Looking at this makes me want to build something bigger than I initially wanted to. It’s awesome, thanks for the detailed info.
For anyone interested, here are the results I got with intel arc a380 qsv transcoding benchmark
| Test | FILE | BITRATE | TIME | AVG_FPS | AVG_SPEED |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| h264_1080p | ribblehead_1080p_h264 | 18952 kb/s | 9.889s | 342.82 | 9.41x |
| h264_4k | ribblehead_4k_h264 | 46881 kb/s | 40.947s | 82.38 | 2.72x |
| hevc_8bit | ribblehead_1080p_hevc_8bit | 14947 kb/s | 9.270s | 366.76 | 9.74x |
| hevc_4k_10bit | ribblehead_4k_hevc_10bit | 44617 kb/s | 66.395s | 51.53 | 1.70x |
Using Jellyfin on RpI4 with transcoding disabled completely. Only direct play. Never needed GPU I guess. Even tried to download and play a 4K video that I know jellyfin supports natively.
On client side, I consume the video on fire stick 4k and mostly using kodi / VLC / mx player as the video player.
Can I ask where did you get the a380 from ?
Stocks in India limited to null!!
Bought from olx who originally bought from amazon. Could not find anywhere new, so looked on olx.
There is no other card like it for home server, so risked(on olx) to get anyhow.
I’ve run Jellyfin for years without a proper GPU on Oracle Server, didn’t have to transcode or anything, on Windows/Linux, the official client was good enough, and for Android, I used Findroid, only place where it didn’t work well was the TV
