CPU for a little server/htpc

[FerK]

Hello, I'm building a little server at home to freed some load from my current PC. I'm looking at something lightweight at power consumption. I'm going to re-use some parts from my PC like the HDD and a memory stick to keep the price as low as possible.

I'm interested in the quicksync technology. I have a really big library of movies/tv shows in my PC that I would like to re-encode and I believe quicksync is quite fast at that, right? My current i5 2500K doesn't have that feature and I can't really leave it on for days encoding.

I also have a torrent client but thats not really that much comsuming as I'm not a 'hardcore' user. So as long as its capable of playing 1080p, sharing movies with Plex/alternative and some computing its ok. I think the integrated graphic card is enough for me as I'm not going to play.

I found some CPU like a Celeron G1840 at 35€, but I'm wondering if its worth to go to a higher option like Celeron G3900 or some Pentium G32xx priced at 50-55€. Whats the difference between them?

Regards.

 

[Kursah]

A Celeron will work, I've used a G32xx as well. I have also used the Celeron 3150 SoC quad core on the Asus N3150-C with good results. There's really A LOT of ways to go about this.

Depends on how much performance you want. I would probably look at an i3 4130/4160 CPU/cheap B85 or Z87/97 board and 16GB DDR3 1600 to get ya started. Or you could buy a used server from Fleabay for cheap...if you can tolerate the power consumption (depending on how old of one you get) and the noise (depending if you go with a 1-4U server rack model).

I run Plex on a virtual machine on my home server (see my system specs), it has 4 cores and 4GB RAM and has 0 issues running multiple LAN and WAN streams, music, movies, tv shows, etc. Actually my home server runs I believe 6 VMs right now, some for my test labs, most for home...DC, file server, Teamspeak server, Minecraft servers (4 MC servers in MineOS), Plex, Print server, virtual PFSense router with OpenVPN server, Test Ubuntu VM, Windows 8.1 VM for lab and GPO testing, etc. And overall it does very good...I will admit that 7.2k spinners on an old RAID card even in RAID 5 starts to bog but not enough to be an issue in a home environment...having an SSD for the main OS drive makes a huge difference though.

Your 2500K would do great as a home server CPU too BTW. It might not have all the new features, but I wouldn't worry too much. I am not familiar with QuickSync, but I am familiar with running an i5 2500 for Server 2012 R2, I'm doing it at work right now. Granted it's a test server and backup NAS setup...it handles everything I can toss at it with ease.

In the end, real server-grade hardware is the way to go...but I can't afford that budget or noise-wise with my wife...I was extremely lucky at getting the parts I do have for my current server very cheap over a couple of years.

 

[kn00tcn]

such low end celerons/pentiums have quicksync? arent you also able to accelerate encoding with... i guess your 670? what's wrong with encoding for days? you only do it once

i dont understand why you need to reencode though

 

[hat]

You've stepped directly into my territory here.

First of all, forget about using QuickSync for encoding, if you're encoding anything you give a hoot about. The quality is less and the file size is more than what you would get out of encoding without it.

Now, when it comes to Plex, the target device matters. If you encode something with h.265 and you play it on the PS3, your Plex server is going to be transcoding on the fly because the PS3 doesn't support h.265. Or, if you encode a pretty good h.264 movie, and your target device doesn't support h.264 pretty well (like the PS3) you're going to have problems. Always extensively research your target device before you encode anything for it.

 

[mistme]

For light load/low power embedded is the way to go I guess, something like 3150 should work well.

i5-2500k has quicksync, it is the hallmark tech of Sandy Bridge and every igpu since then has it, but you have to choose encoding software that has the option to use it.
QuickSync does fast encoding at the expense of quality, slower encodes achieve better quality.
You can probably limit your encoding software to 1 or 2 threads so you can still use half of your i5-2500k while the other half is working as a "server".

 

[slozomby]

a pure file server requires almost no processing power for home use.
the downside of any of those low power processors is encoding with any kind of quality will take forever.

 

[slozomby]

I would like to carry a signal over 1 gigabyte per second

10Gb Ethernet adapters are fairly easy to get ahold of and are in the ballpark of $150, then you'll need a decent switch to support that which isn't cheap either.

and lastly you'll want a nice raid controller that can stripe enough drives to saturate that link. ~$250 + drives

edit: if 2gb is sufficient all you'll need is a couple of Ethernet ports in your system. and a managed switch that and support etherchannel. and be running an os that supports nic bonding.

 

[mistme]

a pure file server requires almost no processing power for home use.
the downside of any of those low power processors is encoding with any kind of quality will take forever.

He can dedicate a part of his 2500k for encoding.
If he wants it faster than an i5-2500k can do, then it will be more costly and power intensive than 2500, not low cost/low power.

 

[mistme]

10Gb Ethernet adapters are fairly easy to get ahold of and are in the ballpark of $150, then you'll need a decent switch to support that which isn't cheap either.

and lastly you'll want a nice raid controller that can stripe enough drives to saturate that link. ~$250 + drives

edit: if 2gb is sufficient all you'll need is a couple of Ethernet ports in your system. and a managed switch that and support etherchannel. and be running an os that supports nic bonding.

This seems to be in the wrong thread.

 

[slozomby]

This seems to be in the wrong thread.

looks like the post I was replying to got deleted. sorry for the off topic.

 

[FerK]

A Celeron will work, I've used a G32xx as well. I have also used the Celeron 3150 SoC quad core on the Asus N3150-C with good results. There's really A LOT of ways to go about this.

Depends on how much performance you want. I would probably look at an i3 4130/4160 CPU/cheap B85 or Z87/97 board and 16GB DDR3 1600 to get ya started. Or you could buy a used server from Fleabay for cheap...if you can tolerate the power consumption (depending on how old of one you get) and the noise (depending if you go with a 1-4U server rack model).

I run Plex on a virtual machine on my home server (see my system specs), it has 4 cores and 4GB RAM and has 0 issues running multiple LAN and WAN streams, music, movies, tv shows, etc. Actually my home server runs I believe 6 VMs right now, some for my test labs, most for home...DC, file server, Teamspeak server, Minecraft servers (4 MC servers in MineOS), Plex, Print server, virtual PFSense router with OpenVPN server, Test Ubuntu VM, Windows 8.1 VM for lab and GPO testing, etc. And overall it does very good...I will admit that 7.2k spinners on an old RAID card even in RAID 5 starts to bog but not enough to be an issue in a home environment...having an SSD for the main OS drive makes a huge difference though.

Your 2500K would do great as a home server CPU too BTW. It might not have all the new features, but I wouldn't worry too much. I am not familiar with QuickSync, but I am familiar with running an i5 2500 for Server 2012 R2, I'm doing it at work right now. Granted it's a test server and backup NAS setup...it handles everything I can toss at it with ease.

In the end, real server-grade hardware is the way to go...but I can't afford that budget or noise-wise with my wife...I was extremely lucky at getting the parts I do have for my current server very cheap over a couple of years.

Well, I only need a CPU that's capable of handling 264 1080p streams with no much effort. The rest of the tasks are pretty lightweight I think. My i5 2500K is currently my gaming PC, if I switch it to server then I would need to spend quite a bit more in building a new pc.

such low end celerons/pentiums have quicksync? arent you also able to accelerate encoding with... i guess your 670? what's wrong with encoding for days? you only do it once

i dont understand why you need to reencode though

My system specs are outdated. I switched that 670 for a Sapphire R9 290 Vapor-X. And yeah, I already did some encodings with it, not much support tho for gcn. The re-encoding is to reduce quality and size. I have some movies here that I stored because 'I wanted to see it' but time has passed and they are still there, waiting, and I know that the moment I decide to delete it because I haven't watched it its going to be the moment I actually wanted to see it. I don't know, its some weird shit, diogenes syndrome but with virtual files. These movies occupies like 10-20 GB each, a great improvement if I reduce them to 1.5-2 GB.

You've stepped directly into my territory here.

First of all, forget about using QuickSync for encoding, if you're encoding anything you give a hoot about. The quality is less and the file size is more than what you would get out of encoding without it.

Now, when it comes to Plex, the target device matters. If you encode something with h.265 and you play it on the PS3, your Plex server is going to be transcoding on the fly because the PS3 doesn't support h.265. Or, if you encode a pretty good h.264 movie, and your target device doesn't support h.264 pretty well (like the PS3) you're going to have problems. Always extensively research your target device before you encode anything for it.

Yeah, I know the quality isn't as if its directly encoded by software. I tried my luck the other day encoding at 265 and I was impressed at the size/quality proportion, but it took 4 hours to my CPU to do such thing. The free time I have I don't want to not be able to do anything else because the CPU is at 100% and I neither want to let the PC on 24/7 with a R9 290 there with its power comsumption along with the rest of the computer.

For light load/low power embedded is the way to go I guess, something like 3150 should work well.

i5-2500k has quicksync, it is the hallmark tech of Sandy Bridge and every igpu since then has it, but you have to choose encoding software that has the option to use it.
QuickSync does fast encoding at the expense of quality, slower encodes achieve better quality.
You can probably limit your encoding software to 1 or 2 threads so you can still use half of your i5-2500k while the other half is working as a "server".

You may laugh, but five years after I realized my CPU had an integrated GPU. I thought it didn't and that Quicksync wasn't an option. Although its still not an option because I have the only 1155 chipset that its not compatible with integrated GPU. Great. Not much market for z68 boards to replace mine (I don't want to loose the ability to overclock).

a pure file server requires almost no processing power for home use.
the downside of any of those low power processors is encoding with any kind of quality will take forever.

Yeah, this would be like an All in One mediaserver/server. For example, I serve a couple of times a week an acestream feed to the living room by DLNA, so the cpu needs to be able to handle such streams (and have an iGPU since its a waste to put any other GPU for the little use they'll have). I also had a look to AM1 CPU, but the processing power isn't too exciting and there is not the same upgrade room for the future that a 1151/1150 have.

 

[mistme]

I found some CPU like a Celeron G1840 at 35€, but I'm wondering if its worth to go to a higher option like Celeron G3900 or some Pentium G32xx priced at 50-55€. Whats the difference between them?

Returning to the original question, which one to get depends on how tight your budget is.
G1840 should be enough for light home server, G32xx would be "future-proofing" it a little.

GPU enconding is probably comparable or better than first release quicksync encoding (since gpu was released later).
And your i5-2500k should work in a z77 motherboard if you happen to get a hold of one.

 

[Kursah]

I know it was mentioned above to watch out for which devices you use on your network for streaming...I have a PS3 I no longer use for streaming as it consumes around 90W and does struggle with certain file types...but my Roku2, TCL Roku TV, tablets and phones all have 0 issues. I don't worry so much about which file type I'm using and for most folks this is a relatively easy solution. Newer Roku sticks are even faster than the Roku 2 due to having a quad core CPU versus dual core...so if the 2 has no issues many other devices won't have issues with streams either.

On the CPU front, I really think I agree we need a budget to work with here. Any CPU from the past several years will really do a fine job, if you want faster and more streams, simply get more cores and decent mid-range clock speeds. 2-4GB RAM is plenty in most cases. As I said, I run my Plex off of a virtual machine, which also runs my Teamspeak, printer and file server services as well for my home network. No issues. I do give the VM 4 threads and up to 4GB RAM, but it doesn't ever seem to fully utilize all those resources...though sometimes I'll see a minor load on all 4 CPU cores.

I understand you don't want to use your 2500K, so find something else. There are some suggestions I detailed in my last post that may lead you in the right direction depending on your budget. At the end of the day its your wallet and decision so hopefully we can point you in the right direction, you can research some further topics and make the right decision for your needs.

 

[FerK]

Returning to the original question, which one to get depends on how tight your budget is.
G1840 should be enough for light home server, G32xx would be "future-proofing" it a little.

GPU enconding is probably comparable or better than first release quicksync encoding (since gpu was released later).
And your i5-2500k should work in a z77 motherboard if you happen to get a hold of one.

I know it was mentioned above to watch out for which devices you use on your network for streaming...I have a PS3 I no longer use for streaming as it consumes around 90W and does struggle with certain file types...but my Roku2, TCL Roku TV, tablets and phones all have 0 issues. I don't worry so much about which file type I'm using and for most folks this is a relatively easy solution. Newer Roku sticks are even faster than the Roku 2 due to having a quad core CPU versus dual core...so if the 2 has no issues many other devices won't have issues with streams either.

On the CPU front, I really think I agree we need a budget to work with here. Any CPU from the past several years will really do a fine job, if you want faster and more streams, simply get more cores and decent mid-range clock speeds. 2-4GB RAM is plenty in most cases. As I said, I run my Plex off of a virtual machine, which also runs my Teamspeak, printer and file server services as well for my home network. No issues. I do give the VM 4 threads and up to 4GB RAM, but it doesn't ever seem to fully utilize all those resources...though sometimes I'll see a minor load on all 4 CPU cores.

I understand you don't want to use your 2500K, so find something else. There are some suggestions I detailed in my last post that may lead you in the right direction depending on your budget. At the end of the day its your wallet and decision so hopefully we can point you in the right direction, you can research some further topics and make the right decision for your needs.

Thank you both for your answers. And sorry if at some point I've been a little bit confusing with all these enconding/server/whatever I've come up with, because I'm confused myself about what to do, as you can see. My budget is about 80-90€ for CPU and MB, thats why I asked in the first post if there was a significant difference between the Celerons and the G32xx, because if there is, well, I can increase the budget a little. Anyway right now I don't know what to do, I may even wait a little, get some more money, use the i5 2500K as a server and get an upgraded cpu, ram and mb for the gaming pc. Maybe get a look at the new AMD Zen although is pretty possible AMD is going to disappoint, again.

 

[newtekie1]

First of all, forget about using QuickSync for encoding, if you're encoding anything you give a hoot about. The quality is less and the file size is more than what you would get out of encoding without it.

I was just going to say this. Quicksync is fine for something you are going to be uploading to youtube or something where the quality is going to get mangled anyway so it doesn't really matter. But for media that is staying local and that I care about, I won't use it. Personally, I can't stand any single pass encoding, it all looks terrible to me. So nVidia's accelerated encoding looks bad too, IMO.

Yeah, I know the quality isn't as if its directly encoded by software. I tried my luck the other day encoding at 265 and I was impressed at the size/quality proportion, but it took 4 hours to my CPU to do such thing. The free time I have I don't want to not be able to do anything else because the CPU is at 100% and I neither want to let the PC on 24/7 with a R9 290 there with its power comsumption along with the rest of the computer.

Thank you both for your answers. And sorry if at some point I've been a little bit confusing with all these enconding/server/whatever I've come up with, because I'm confused myself about what to do, as you can see. My budget is about 80-90€ for CPU and MB, thats why I asked in the first post if there was a significant difference between the Celerons and the G32xx, because if there is, well, I can increase the budget a little. Anyway right now I don't know what to do, I may even wait a little, get some more money, use the i5 2500K as a server and get an upgraded cpu, ram and mb for the gaming pc. Maybe get a look at the new AMD Zen although is pretty possible AMD is going to disappoint, again.

You really have to tell us what you plan to stream to. If you are streaming to other PCs, then the server has to do basically no heavy transcoding while you play the media back, so any CPU will do. If you are streaming to something that can't play H265/H264 then you need something beefier.

Right now my FX-8350 is in my server and does all my encoding. It does ok for H264 encoding, but is rather slow at H265. Generally an H265 encode takes twice as long to encode as the source material. So a 1 hour long video takes 2 hours to encode with H265. But, like I said, this is a 2-pass encoding. My i7-4790K is faster by about 30%.

However, the good thing about having a dedicated encoding machine/server like you want to do, and I have, is that you can just leave it on encoding. That is the main reason I haven't switched from something other than the FX-8350. I can leave it encoding 24/7 if I have enough work for it to do and it works fine. You just have to make sure you set the encoder to "Low" priority. That way everything else on the computer will have a higher CPU priority. So any time something else needed to use the CPU, the encoder will slow down to give the other program the resources it needs. Any good encoding program will allow you to set the priority for this reason.

What this means is that you can essentially use any CPU you want as long as it is powerful enough to do everything else you need it to do. The encoding will basically just be happening in the background and won't really affect anything else the server is doing.

 

[Jetster]

Any of the Newer Pentium dual cores are perfect. 4th generation or higher

 

[cdawall]

For a very long time I ran an athlon 5350 with a raid card as my server. It was more than capable of pumping out data using Kodi. It is not however powerful enough to encode on the fly. So there were occasions when the client side would have hiccups. Client side for me is 3 athlon 5350's@2.4 with an ssd at the TV's.

Since then I have moved to a xeon 2650v4 and encode on the fly so that the athlon based clients don't sweat. That has been the best choice for quality I could have done.

For wattage perspective the client side boxes use an asrock AM1-H board that lets me use a laptop brick directly onto the board for power. Those consume 35w total with 2 ddr3 sticks, overclocked to 2.4 and 1 ssd. The server side when it was athlon based consumed closer to 150w under load because of the 10 enterprise level hdd's and raid card. No idea what it pulls now since I haven't checked lol.

 

[mistme]

Thank you both for your answers. And sorry if at some point I've been a little bit confusing with all these enconding/server/whatever I've come up with, because I'm confused myself about what to do, as you can see. My budget is about 80-90€ for CPU and MB, thats why I asked in the first post if there was a significant difference between the Celerons and the G32xx, because if there is, well, I can increase the budget a little. Anyway right now I don't know what to do, I may even wait a little, get some more money, use the i5 2500K as a server and get an upgraded cpu, ram and mb for the gaming pc. Maybe get a look at the new AMD Zen although is pretty possible AMD is going to disappoint, again.

Getting a Kaby setup and retire Sandy to home server seems like a good plan (I will be doing Ivy to Kaby refresh), although you'll still need a solution to MSI P67A-GD65 B3 no igpu problem.
Until then you can check how much of 2500 is actually in use and if you can run 1 or 2 thread low priority encoding process without too much interference.

 

[FerK]

I was just going to say this. Quicksync is fine for something you are going to be uploading to youtube or something where the quality is going to get mangled anyway so it doesn't really matter. But for media that is staying local and that I care about, I won't use it. Personally, I can't stand any single pass encoding, it all looks terrible to me. So nVidia's accelerated encoding looks bad too, IMO.




You really have to tell us what you plan to stream to. If you are streaming to other PCs, then the server has to do basically no heavy transcoding while you play the media back, so any CPU will do. If you are streaming to something that can't play H265/H264 then you need something beefier.

Right now my FX-8350 is in my server and does all my encoding. It does ok for H264 encoding, but is rather slow at H265. Generally an H265 encode takes twice as long to encode as the source material. So a 1 hour long video takes 2 hours to encode with H265. But, like I said, this is a 2-pass encoding. My i7-4790K is faster by about 30%.

However, the good thing about having a dedicated encoding machine/server like you want to do, and I have, is that you can just leave it on encoding. That is the main reason I haven't switched from something other than the FX-8350. I can leave it encoding 24/7 if I have enough work for it to do and it works fine. You just have to make sure you set the encoder to "Low" priority. That way everything else on the computer will have a higher CPU priority. So any time something else needed to use the CPU, the encoder will slow down to give the other program the resources it needs. Any good encoding program will allow you to set the priority for this reason.

What this means is that you can essentially use any CPU you want as long as it is powerful enough to do everything else you need it to do. The encoding will basically just be happening in the background and won't really affect anything else the server is doing.

Some Smart TVs and a couple of not so powerful PC (one being a really old Athlon 64 3700+ and the other one a C2D E8200). Yeah my idea is also to have a little bit more 'comfort', just leave the server doing something and forget about it without worrying by the workload.

Any of the Newer Pentium dual cores are perfect. 4th generation or higher

Thanks.

For a very long time I ran an athlon 5350 with a raid card as my server. It was more than capable of pumping out data using Kodi. It is not however powerful enough to encode on the fly. So there were occasions when the client side would have hiccups. Client side for me is 3 athlon 5350's@2.4 with an ssd at the TV's.

Since then I have moved to a xeon 2650v4 and encode on the fly so that the athlon based clients don't sweat. That has been the best choice for quality I could have done.

For wattage perspective the client side boxes use an asrock AM1-H board that lets me use a laptop brick directly onto the board for power. Those consume 35w total with 2 ddr3 sticks, overclocked to 2.4 and 1 ssd. The server side when it was athlon based consumed closer to 150w under load because of the 10 enterprise level hdd's and raid card. No idea what it pulls now since I haven't checked lol.

Good setup there. I saw some old Xeon's in the used part market, but its hard to find motherboards for them.

Getting a Kaby setup and retire Sandy to home server seems like a good plan (I will be doing Ivy to Kaby refresh), although you'll still need a solution to MSI P67A-GD65 B3 no igpu problem.
Until then you can check how much of 2500 is actually in use and if you can run 1 or 2 thread low priority encoding process without too much interference.

Yeah, the MSI motherboard is still an issue. It has worked perfectly until now, I have contacted MSI about the matter. I once managed to corrupt both BIOS in this motherboard and MSI were very kind to replace it for another one when they had absolutely no obligation to do so as BIOS flashing wasn't covered in the warranty. So I have asked them if they have some of these old motherboards getting dust in their storages even if its a refurbished one and I can get one for a normal price. Its a long shot but I lose nothing for asking. For now I've been searching in some used marketplaces but so far nothing, I can only find H61 boards.

 

[hat]

Yeah, I know the quality isn't as if its directly encoded by software. I tried my luck the other day encoding at 265 and I was impressed at the size/quality proportion, but it took 4 hours to my CPU to do such thing. The free time I have I don't want to not be able to do anything else because the CPU is at 100% and I neither want to let the PC on 24/7 with a R9 290 there with its power comsumption along with the rest of the computer.

Yeah, this would be like an All in One mediaserver/server. For example, I serve a couple of times a week an acestream feed to the living room by DLNA, so the cpu needs to be able to handle such streams (and have an iGPU since its a waste to put any other GPU for the little use they'll have). I also had a look to AM1 CPU, but the processing power isn't too exciting and there is not the same upgrade room for the future that a 1151/1150 have.

You're robbing Peter to pay Paul here. You don't want to transcode because it takes time and you don't want to leave your 290 running, but you want a more powerful solution for your media server to transcode on the fly. That's gonna cause more power draw/heat output than doing it once. And, you can transcode and do other things at the same time. I do it all the time. It's pretty good about running in the background and leaving your other stuff plenty of power to run.

 

[newtekie1]

Some Smart TVs and a couple of not so powerful PC (one being a really old Athlon 64 3700+ and the other one a C2D E8200). Yeah my idea is also to have a little bit more 'comfort', just leave the server doing something and forget about it without worrying by the workload.

In that case, I wouldn't cheap out on the processor. It sounds like the server will be doing a lot of transcoding, so you'll need something with the processing power to do that. The encoding, as I said, isn't much of a concern, since you can adjust the priority on that to make sure it will free up resources for transcoding.

 

[FerK]

Thank you all for the help, I'll use the i5 2500K as a server. But I will have to wait a little.

 

[kn00tcn]

These movies occupies like 10-20 GB each, a great improvement if I reduce them to 1.5-2 GB
....
The free time I have I don't want to not be able to do anything else because the CPU is at 100% and I neither want to let the PC on 24/7 with a R9 290 there with its power comsumption along with the rest of the computer

raw blurays? ok i am on board with reencoding (but actually it's easier to find someone else's encode)

who told you you cant do anything else!? almost everytime i'm 100% usage encoding my fraps captures (or rendering in cinema4d or aftereffects), i continue to use the computer as if nothing is running, what do you think process priorities are for? the ONLY time i struggled with max usage was on a single core athlonxp, ironically the older slower pentium4 by comparison never had freezing windows interfaces since it has hyperthreading

the 290 would only have idle power consumption (unless the decode operation triggers UVD), what is your concern here, heat or electricity bill? temporarily remove the 290 since it's not being used for encoding

also, if you know how long one movie takes, you can estimate how long they'll all take, real math is much better than a vague 'it will probably take a few days, something will overheat', in fact you could simply encode one a day, set the tool to shutdown when finished, go to bed each night, wake up to a fresh encode, boom... all these days wasted looking for hardware instead of encoding (well if you have enough free space, there is no rush)

if you have fast internet (borrow a university or library connection), you can encode online, even with google drive or youtube to make it generate a 720p or 1080p mp4 that's under 8mbit

h265 is so tempting but it depends on your devices, although you can get cheap ~$50-90 android boxes that support it by now, potentially recent raspberry pi but you'll have to research

i havent mentioned that i've dealt with video formats & encoding for over a decade, but at the same time it's extremely irritating...

 

[hat]

I'm using h265 myself with a Roku Premiere Plus. You could easily get away with the $80 Roku Premiere (non Plus) if you're okay with not having ethernet, or a headphones jack in your remote (heh). It supports AC wifi, which I don't have, but it did see my 5GHz N channel. More than enough for my h265 streams I'm sure, but I already got the Plus model and already had ethernet there anyway so ethernet it is.

It just can't handle really tough h.264 encodes. My current h.264 library gets transcoded by Plex for having too many reference frames. Apparently it supports up to 8, I used 16... it's all going h.265 anyways soon, so... /shrug

 

[FerK]

raw blurays? ok i am on board with reencoding (but actually it's easier to find someone else's encode)

who told you you cant do anything else!? almost everytime i'm 100% usage encoding my fraps captures (or rendering in cinema4d or aftereffects), i continue to use the computer as if nothing is running, what do you think process priorities are for? the ONLY time i struggled with max usage was on a single core athlonxp, ironically the older slower pentium4 by comparison never had freezing windows interfaces since it has hyperthreading

the 290 would only have idle power consumption (unless the decode operation triggers UVD), what is your concern here, heat or electricity bill? temporarily remove the 290 since it's not being used for encoding

also, if you know how long one movie takes, you can estimate how long they'll all take, real math is much better than a vague 'it will probably take a few days, something will overheat', in fact you could simply encode one a day, set the tool to shutdown when finished, go to bed each night, wake up to a fresh encode, boom... all these days wasted looking for hardware instead of encoding (well if you have enough free space, there is no rush)

if you have fast internet (borrow a university or library connection), you can encode online, even with google drive or youtube to make it generate a 720p or 1080p mp4 that's under 8mbit

h265 is so tempting but it depends on your devices, although you can get cheap ~$50-90 android boxes that support it by now, potentially recent raspberry pi but you'll have to research

i havent mentioned that i've dealt with video formats & encoding for over a decade, but at the same time it's extremely irritating...

Thansk for the tips. This past summer I grabbed an Amlogic 905 tv box that supposedly supports h265, didn't try it myself yet.

I'm using h265 myself with a Roku Premiere Plus. You could easily get away with the $80 Roku Premiere (non Plus) if you're okay with not having ethernet, or a headphones jack in your remote (heh). It supports AC wifi, which I don't have, but it did see my 5GHz N channel. More than enough for my h265 streams I'm sure, but I already got the Plus model and already had ethernet there anyway so ethernet it is.

It just can't handle really tough h.264 encodes. My current h.264 library gets transcoded by Plex for having too many reference frames. Apparently it supports up to 8, I used 16... it's all going h.265 anyways soon, so... /shrug

I live in Spain, Roku devices are really unknown around here and I'm not even sure they would work.


Thanks everyone for their help, I got some interesting ideas.