Per my previous post, I’m working on updating my server that’s running a J3455 Celeron with 16gigs of ram.

Goals:

  • Support at least six hard drives (currently have six drives in software RAID 6). Can move 7th main drive to nvme.
  • Be faster at transcoding video. This is primarily so I can use PhotoPrism for video clips. Real-time transcoding 4K 80mbps video down to something streamabke would be nice. Despite getting QuickSync to work on the Celeron, I can’t pull more than 20fps unless I drop the output to like 640x480. Current build has no PCIe x16 slot.
  • Energy efficiency. Trying to avoid a dedicated video card.
  • Support more RAM. Currently maxed at 16gb.
  • Price: around $500
  • Server-grade hardware would be nice, but I want newer versions of quicksync and can’t afford newer server hardware. Motherboard choice is selected primarily because of chipset, number of SATA ports, and I found one open box.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/JX2gHG

Hoping to move my main drive to the NVME and keep the other six drives as-is without needing a reinstall.

Thoughts?

  • ch00f@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    3·
    8 months ago

    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. https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/discussions/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.