I’m thinking of getting an Intel NUC, which will act as a low-power consumption server. I plan to install Linux (Ubuntu), and stream video files from my NAS. I understand that the recent Intel Quick Sync Video transcoders in later generations Intel iGPUs are pretty decent in terms of video quality and number of streams.
I looked at the Intel QSV Wikipedia page, and there is only mention of video support features and capabilities with each version increment.
Does this mean, the audio transcoding is done entirely by the CPU? If so, how much impact does the audio transcoding have on CPU load? Is it dependent on the size/bit-rate of the audio stream, if the client is able to recognise or direct play the audio stream?
QSV (Quick Sync Video) does not transcode audio streams.
Audio stream transcoding, like subtitle burning, has always been a CPU-based task.
I have several processors ranging from NAS CPUs to Intel Core i7s.
It seems common to use about 30% of a single core per audio stream. Converting something as complex as 7.1 to stereo will take a bit more (~35%)
It uses the CPU for audio transcoding, but its not really a performance hit. I used to have a dual core Pentium Gold and had no issue with audio transcoding on the CPU… But it is worth getting more cores/threads and better performance for some of the other things that rely on the CPU - especially since some of those tasks utilize only a single thread.
Things like subtitle burn in, deinterlacing, and background thumbnail generation.
Here’s another thread where I showed CPU stats during transcode of 10 streams. In this case, the audio was transcoding from English (DTS-HD MA 5.1) to AAC on the CPU for each stream, and as you can see it didn’t kill the CPU:
I don’t really think you would need more than an i3 or i5 unless you want to transcode a bunch (5-10 or more) streams simultaneously?
Ah, didn’t realise / know about other things that PleX has to work on beside audio & video, lol (I’m still new to PleX transcoding).
Nate, that chart is really handy, I’m a visual person, lol. Good to know that CPUs can handle transcoding high lossless audio streams to AAC. Most of my video files have AAC audio, but some times I wonder if DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD is worth keeping, because not sure if my devices can get the audio if my PleX server’s CPU isn’t fast enough. Now, I know, I don’t have to worry.
