I want to host security cameras and a plex server. Does this mean that my server needs a GPU? (Or would benefit from one). I heard plex does fine with just a CPU
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I have two GPUs in a single tower.
A GTX 750 to that I share with my LXCs. It does jellyfin transcode, frigate nvr for 3 cameras, kasm accelerated desktops, xfce4 pve host acceleration, Jupyter tensorflow, ersatz tv transcode, and I plan to use it for immich. At most it is taxed about 25 percent but I plan to have a lot more nvr and jellyfin streams.
I also have a 1660 ti passed to windows 11 VM for my gaming VM. I use sunshine and moonlight for remote gaming but I also roll easy diffusion for some image generation. I had an LLM but (https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui) but it was too slow for what I’m used to - I just use bing chat and now meta on whatsapp for my personal and an LLM I have access to at work.
How do you do GPU passthrough?
Get an Intel cpu with iGPU (most do) and you’ll be good to go for anything that you’re doing there.
Jellyfin transcoding.
I stream games from my server PC using steam-headless.
steam-headless That just gave me an idea to install Steam on cloud and play from local. Not sure about the performance though.
I use a p4000 to transcode Plex content. The GPU uses less power than maxing out my CPU. I also have the GPU available in Kasm though I’m unsure if that works as I mostly use kasm as a SSH jumpbox or access to an unfiltered Chrome session at work.
When I upgrade my CPU, I plan to put my spare 1650 in my host and spin up a windows gaming VM for guests and remote play.
Consider any low power gpu for media hardware transcoding
Yes, GPU for transcoding is reason enough, but object detection using frigate, or AI stuff is nice also. Buy a nvidia.
I added a cheap Quadro p400 to my Unraid server as the old girl (4790s) couldn’t handle h265 on the igpu.
Far cheaper and easier than a whole server upgrade just for a little more capability when transcoding.
Interested in the arc a380 just for transcoding when the kernel is updated to support the cards in Unraid natively when they eventually do but in no rush to do so.
My main server has a 3070 and I use it to stream games through moonlight to all my tvs and computers around the house. That way I get the most value from the card instead of it being locked into one machine
plex would benifit from using a gpu
There’s the possibility of self hosted speech recognition for use with Mycroft or other personal assistants. Saves you from having Amazon listen to your every word.
With plex, an intel quick sync igpu will be fine unless you plan to do >10 transcodes at a time
I use Jellyfin which is similar to Plex. I have it on a Raspberry Pi 4 8 GB. It’s perfectly fine if I’m sending H264 but most modern browsers do not support H265 so it forces the server to transcode. That will consume almost all processing power if it’s CPU-only and is a very slow process.
That will consume almost all processing power if it’s CPU-only and is a very slow process.
This is a complicated topic and the terminology is a bit ambiguous.
Yes, non-hardware-accelerated transcoding is slow and will consume the CPU.
However, you don’t necessarily need an external GPU to do hardware-accelerated transcoding. When you use Intel QuickSync for example, the codec hardware is part if the CPU. On the other hand it is only in CPUs that have integrated graphics, so you could still say the transcoding is done “by the GPU”, just not the additional one that you put in. In fact, putting in a dedicated graphics card often disables the integrated graphics and you have to use tricks to re-enable it before you can use it for transcoding again.
Plex will benefit with GPU and for security cameras you can have something like Frigate for object recognitions
Bought an Intel A750 for transcoding on my Jellyfin server. The CPU did fine for just 1 or 2 people watching at the same time. It just pegged out the CPU at 100%. Plus had limited support for what types could be transcoded. With the A750 can easily handle several people watching at the same time and can transcode any format. With little CPU usages, so everything else running stays fast.