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Author Topic: Possible to use GPU for transcoding when streaming?  (Read 765 times)

NirreFirre

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Possible to use GPU for transcoding when streaming?
« on: January 07, 2020, 03:48:29 pm »

Hi, this could be my first support "call" ever (being in the IT industry..)

I have in the past (2-4 years ago) been happy on MC20 and 22 on Win7x64, streaming away on Android (BubbleUnPNP, MX player) but when MC23 came I upgraded and got a new Win10x64 server. Library imported fine, settnings etc. RO Standard, nothing touched. All playing great during movie nights and managing the music library for Sonos is great.

Also, during 2019 my family switched to iOS and JRemote as streaming front end but I can't seem to make this happen. On the APU, an old AMD A8-5500 (2C2T@3,3GHz, 8gb RAM) with a HD7560D iGPU the processor is maxed out and only seems to be able to transcode (?) a few minutes at the most. This is "as designed" I guess for platforms that don't support MKVs, FLAC etc? :(
44.1/16 FLACs (~1Mb/s) are fine, they need 5-10% CPU to be streamed so it's only video I'm having issues with.

Workaround try #1
VLC on the iPad works great when on the home network but it can't access MC from remote networks.
I've tried VPN and had fights with multicast/UPNP ports, UDP, subnets and disabled FW and so on but nope..VLC won't get to the media servers or even SMB shares over VPN (assigning IP# in the same C net as the local hosts etc).

And, after JRemote 3.30 on iPad Pro and iPhone 6S crashes directly on both devices when I trying to play video (MP4, MKV, MPEG2 etc).. Don't know if this is a setting I have somehow left "on" or if 3.30 is to blame (iOS 13.3).

Workaround try #2
I got a used nVidia GTX 1060 6GB this xmas thinking I could offload the transcoding to this more capable GPU. But sadly, RO HQ and madVR settings looks great for local playback but no change during streaming, even though the ..transcoding during streaming still seems to be 99% CPU dependent. Most media is not hi-bitrate but 720-1080p in the 2-5Mb/s range so it's not a network capacity issue. OS and MC is running on an OK SATA Intel SSD, media is on local 2-6TB drives (110MB/s read).

Is there any chance of using the GPU for transcoding video during streming?

Settings/inf/various adjustments tried:
  • C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 23\Temp\xxx is being filled with seg<#>.ts files of 5-6s length.
  • The VideoStream.ts playlist file in the same directory has lines on the form (Panel):
    #EXT-X-VERSION:3
    #EXT-X-ALLOW-CACHE:YES
    #EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:8
    #EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:0
    /MCWS/v1/File/GetFile.ts?File=62186&Token=ztECYu0w&Conversion=WebPanel&Quality=High&Playback=2&HLS=1&Context=seg0.ts 
    ..
  • GTX1060 is showing "Video Decoding" to be 5-8% during the CPU (all 2C2T) is pegged at 100..
  • Disable video buffer to disk (for low powered systems): no difference
  • DLNA servers and Video settings, Mode: Specified output only when (h264 variants to be light/suitable to iOS)

Old thread but my situation seems similar, no solution though: https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,114904.msg794456.html[/size]
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Hendrik

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Re: Possible to use GPU for transcoding when streaming?
« Reply #1 on: January 07, 2020, 05:52:09 pm »

We introduced hardware accelerated transcoding in MC25, at least for Windows:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,120104.0.html

We plan to extend the capabilities and configuration in MC26 in the future, but it should already help quite a bit on a system such as yours.

A somewhat related issue unfortunately is that JRemote on iOS currently has some issues playing the video from MC, no matter how its transcoded. We use the built-in Apple video playback component, but it fails at sanity and kills itself by buffering more video then it can deal with until it just quits when its out of memory.
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NirreFirre

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Re: Possible to use GPU for transcoding when streaming?
« Reply #2 on: January 07, 2020, 07:00:46 pm »

Whohoo!  That's a most helpful and economical answer! ;D
I can continue to use the perfectly adequate hardware and not buy new CPU, DDR4 and motherboard, and you guys get's another happy, MC26 upgraded customer.
win-win, just let's hope the JRemote issue is solved (iOS/iPad 13 must be the most buggy version yet so perhaps the issue is in the OS?)
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NirreFirre

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Re: Possible to use GPU for transcoding when streaming?
« Reply #3 on: January 08, 2020, 12:59:35 pm »

As a future help for others, I would like to suggest this information (about GPU and MC25) is added to the wiki (apart from the release notes). Searching the forum can get you a lot (too much) of threads without a structured way to filter etc.
I'm thinking of
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Home_Networking_Examples
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Media_Server
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/DLNA
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Category:Frequently_Asked_Questions

Adding a page (Transcoding or GPU etc) to
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Category:Media_Network
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