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Joined 1Y ago
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Cake day: Jun 10, 2023

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Yeah, but we always run them in native formats, so it’s not a big load on the processor. We only watch the 4K stuff at home where it’s got a hardwired gigabit ethernet connection.

If you saw my other comment, I’m kind of talking myself out of this upgrade since I managed to get qsv working on my current rig.


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.


Not yet! But I do have a bunch of different apps running, and I’ve always had to baby it. Looking forward to having more room for activities.


[Question] Rate my upgrade!
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?
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That’s interesting. I’m running a software raid since I’ve been warned of dying raid controllers making your data irretrievable unless you buy an exact replacement. I guess the enterprise folks have that figured out.

Having a little trouble finding details online. Do those two cables going off to the right split off into a bunch of SATA connections?


Yeah, I have an offline backup I do every year in a fireproof safe in my basement. Might open a safe deposit box at some point, but I feel reasonably safe.

Good call on power efficiency. I’ll have to keep that in mind. I think I’m currently drawing around 100W which is mostly the hard drives (the CPU doesn’t even need a fan). I assume that might go up a bit in a new build, but I think the benefits will be worth it.


Thanks for the tips!

To clarify, by “x99,” do you mean LGA2011-3? That’s the socket wikipedia associates with the hardware.

And as for Arc, it looks like they’re a great option for video encoding. I’m actually using QuickSync already on my Celeron processor which has helped. From what I can understand, it looks like QuickSync is basically the same processor on all of the Arc cards, so I can just go with the cheapest card if I don’t plan to use much of the other features? Looking like an A380 can be had for $100 or so.


I've been running a headless Ubuntu server for about 10 years or so. At first, it was just a file/print server, so I bought a super low power motherboard/processor to cut down on the energy bill. It's a passively cooled Intel Celeron J3455 "maxed out" with 16BG of RAM. Since then it's ballooned into a Plex/Shinobi/Photoprism/Samba/Frigate/MQTT/Matrix/Piwigo monster. It has six drives in RAID6 and a 7th for system storage (three of the drives are through a PCI card). I'm planning on moving my server closet, and I'll be upgrading the case into a rack-mount style case. While I'm at it, I figured I could upgrade the hardware as well. I was curious what I should look for in hardware. I've built a number of gaming PCs in the past, but I've never looked at server hardware. What features should I look for? Also, is there anything specific (besides a general purpose video card) that I can buy to speed up video encoding? It'd be nice to be able to real-time transcode video with Plex.
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