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[dcm]

I am planning to purchase a new computer for playing music and video through the HDMI input of a pre/pro using JRiver.   I will be playing multichannel music stored as FLAC in a range of sample rates, but also want to be able to play music files encoded in Atmos and Auro-3D. A new pre/pro will take care of processing the Atmos and Auro-3D files. I would plan to process other files in JRiver, as I have been doing to now, including room correction via the Dirac plug-in, and using the pre/pro in “direct” mode.

I will also be playing movies and concert videos from the new computer via the HDMI input of the pre/pro.

At present I am using a Windows laptop, which is now over 4 years old and showing signs of its age. I place a premium on a computer that is quiet. 

Is the NUC13 a good fit for these needs? What other options might I consider?
Thank you

[davewave]

Everybody's experience differs with HTPC based on the quality of their media, and the recency of the media.   If you have a bunch of hand me down files, you are likely to encounter playback problems.  If you ripped everything yourself and didn't fool much with the files, things tend to go easier.     I don't think Dolby Atmos taxes most machines all that much, as its really TrueHD with some extensions.   What can tax a system is UHD/2160/4K  .  I don't have much in the way of this, but apparently some new formats take up a lot of resource (AV1).   So you need to decide what you want to play and that may impact your choices.   I have a cheapo HTPC in a tertiary system (Beelink) with an integrated all in one chip from AMD and it's fine for 1080p material.   I haven't tried it with more sophisticated media.    My old NUC units couldn't hack much of my material by the way, but the AMD unit I chose had a lot of graphics cores.        For most of my HTPC needs, I buy lower end Dell units and upgrade them myself.   

[jmone]

The 12/13th Gen NUCs will probably do what you want, but it depends if you would be happy with the basic JRVR Settings for video.  If you want the "best" possible video rendering then you are going to need something with a dedicated midrange or better GPU (which raises the cost, noise, power, etc).

Anyway here is a review of the NUC - https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,134761.0.html

[rec head]

I just got a NUC13 yesterday and have only begun setting it up. During the very initial steps of downloading a bunch of updates it did get pretty loud even though none of the systems seemed to be getting taxed too hard. I am going to try and get it setup in my AV rack today and will report back.

[rec head]

I have the NUC in place and can't hear it. In the BIOS I changed the fan setting to quiet. If you plan on having the NUC right by your head you will hear it but overall it is pretty quiet.

[jmone]

Mine is in a cupboard with the rest of the equipment and I don't hear it.  I've got the fans on Auto.

[eve]

There are fanless x86 systems out there, including some with decent performance if sound is your concern.
I've had good luck with no name ones typically sold as firewalls or targeted at embedded industrial applications, for my needs.
As long as you aren't going for expensive upscaling settings in JRVR (or MadVR), most are pretty capable to handle your standard 2160p H265 files (so up to anything you get from a UHD BD).

AV1 isn't *super* urgently relevant right now, down the line it will be but you're not getting physical media with AV1 on it yet and streaming services haven't rolled it out fully. The recent intel platforms have AV1 decode support anyways. In my experiments, it's still not there. The Intel encoders for AV1 aren't bad (AV1 encode on CPU is relatively impractical speed wise) but I do wonder if waiting a generation is a better option.

[dcm]

Thank you all for your input.

This is very helpful

[jmone]

I do a bit of AV1 encoding on my 4090 and the playback on the NUC12/13's iGPU HW AV1 decoder works just fine with JRVR (and these encodes are UHD 10Bit, 50fps AV1)

[davewave]

Jmone, what is your subject material for this cool editing?

[jmone]

Davinci Resolve - I've a Sony FX6 shooting 10-Bit Log UHD 4:2:2 as the main cam (as well as an DJI Air 2s / DJI Action 2).  All capturing 50fps @ 360 degree shutter then after grading rendering out to HDR 10-Bit 4:2:0 AV1 UHD with the 4090.  Works well and the rendering is about real time (pending on the effect which can slam down the rendering time).  Mostly it is our travel videos.  We just did 6 weeks in Spain/Portugal/Morrocco. The final renders then sit on the MC Media Server for playback on MC Clients, so for me it is now important that AV1 HW Decoding is supported and will play HDR UHD 50fps just fine.  Thanfully the little NUC does fine.

[davewave]

I have the  BlackMagic card and need to do some video editing myself.  Resolve seems pretty complex but I need to learn it as that is the best method to edit BlackMagic captures.

[eve]

Davinci Resolve - I've a Sony FX6 shooting 10-Bit Log UHD 4:2:2 as the main cam (as well as an DJI Air 2s / DJI Action 2).  All capturing 50fps @ 360 degree shutter then after grading rendering out to HDR 10-Bit 4:2:0 AV1 UHD with the 4090.  Works well and the rendering is about real time (pending on the effect which can slam down the rendering time).  Mostly it is our travel videos.  We just did 6 weeks in Spain/Portugal/Morrocco. The final renders then sit on the MC Media Server for playback on MC Clients, so for me it is now important that AV1 HW Decoding is supported and will play HDR UHD 50fps just fine.  Thanfully the little NUC does fine.

Good to know! What's your average bitrate looking like?

AV1 is what I'm looking at for trailers / video thumbnails. To get like 'instant' playback in a UI, doing an on the fly wrap (and in some cases transcode) to DASH or HLS is too slow, it ends up being like a few seconds and it feels weird. So I figured, I'll do everything in as tiny pre-encoded stuff, and if I'm doing that, I might as well use something cutting edge like AV1. In my little experiments, it's done well at targeting lower res, economical bitrates. This way there's a manifest and the chunks already made and ready to go. Essentially, beyond trailers, I want to take like 30s from each film's best master and stitch together some shots, I'm *maybe* going to do it intelligently, or more likely, randomly (3 10s portions, 6 5s portions etc).

[jmone]

I used to do two different "encodes" for importing into MC:
- "LAN" : 80mbps - This was for streaming all the stuff around the house to the other devices
- "Web" : 25mbps - This was for streaming selected stuff across the Internet

These days, I've simplified it and just do the 80mbps and if I want something to sent to others over the internet I just upload it to YouTube and mark it as "unlisted" and send them the link.  I let YouTube do whatever it wants in the way of transcoding (I normally get a SD, HD, UHD and HDR version being rendered)... and they handle all of the device compatibility stuff.  I do note that even if you upload AV1 to YouTube it is still transcoding everything to VP9, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxQckvD5Ipw

The only downside is you have to be careful of any copyright audio you may have but so far nothing has been rejected (though plenty have been detected as having commercial music as a background track).  The most "restriction" I've had is on one video of mine that cannot be played in Rusia or Belarus as a result of the music authors preferences.

This method also works when traveling with the Laptop.  Unfortunately the iGPU only has AC1 decode not encode support.  Hence, I churned out my 1min daily video of our travels at a low 10mbps HEVC bitrate for uploading to YouTube as the upload speeds from Hotels etc are not that great.  Still looked perfectly acceptable for what it was especially as most is going to have watched them on their phones. 

[jmone]

[eve]

I used to do two different "encodes" for importing into MC:
- "LAN" : 80mbps - This was for streaming all the stuff around the house to the other devices
- "Web" : 25mbps - This was for streaming selected stuff across the Internet

These days, I've simplified it and just do the 80mbps and if I want something to sent to others over the internet I just upload it to YouTube and mark it as "unlisted" and send them the link.  I let YouTube do whatever it wants in the way of transcoding (I normally get a SD, HD, UHD and HDR version being rendered)... and they handle all of the device compatibility stuff.  I do note that even if you upload AV1 to YouTube it is still transcoding everything to VP9, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxQckvD5Ipw

The only downside is you have to be careful of any copyright audio you may have but so far nothing has been rejected (though plenty have been detected as having commercial music as a background track).  The most "restriction" I've had is on one video of mine that cannot be played in Rusia or Belarus as a result of the music authors preferences.

This method also works when traveling with the Laptop.  Unfortunately the iGPU only has AC1 decode not encode support.  Hence, I churned out my 1min daily video of our travels at a low 10mbps HEVC bitrate for uploading to YouTube as the upload speeds from Hotels etc are not that great.  Still looked perfectly acceptable for what it was especially as most is going to have watched them on their phones.

Current gen intel seems to do AV1. I got a bunch of flack for this from my buddies but Intel's quasi failed consumer GPU adventure ARC, is not the failure it seems to be.
For essentially peanuts you could get a 16GB GPU that did AV1 encode and decode. To me, it felt like they were pushed into crapping something out for the consumer space, using the stuff that WORKS in the more enterprisey space.

[jmone]

The Intel ARC will do AV1 HW accelerated encode / decode and is supported by Resolve, so it could be a cheap entry point for AV1 creation (though I tend to stick to nvidia).

Intel iGPU (latest gens) will do AV1 HW accelerated decode so good for consumption of said media. 

[eve]

The Intel ARC will do AV1 HW accelerated encode / decode and is supported by Resolve, so it could be a cheap entry point for AV1 creation (though I tend to stick to nvidia).

Yeah I wouldn't run an ARC GPU for a "computer" but as an accelerator, they're tempting. I stick with Nvidia too. Beyond having more consistent Windows drivers than AMD, CUDA is indispensable.