I was looking for solutions to 4K transcoding and saw hardware transcoding may be an option? I’m wondering if running PMS on the Shield TV would be better than on my FreeNAS server?
My server can currently handle a half dozen 1080p transcodes np, but if the Shield TV can handle 4K transcodes maybe it’s worth it. I’d still host the files on the FreeNAS server.
You are better off upgrading your CPU (or adding another one if the MB has dual sockets).
Even if you are unable to do that, I would just say to keep it there, the ShieldTV is not that powerful, it may be able to do HW transcoding but the downgrade in overall performance compared to what you already have is huge.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking and why I was asking… Problem is FreeNAS is just getting Docker support now and I don’t think it’s possible (or know if it ever will be) to do gpu passthrough into the VM. Even if I upgraded my CPU or installed a GPU I don’t think PMS will ever support hardware transcoding on FreeNAS/FreeBSD.
I was in a similar position:
Beefy freenas, got temp issues last summer, moved pms on an old laptop with an i5, worked great, then bought a new shield tv and used the old one as a pure server. 4W in idle, 10-15W when transcoding.
