does the GPU play a role in ripping and streaming?

[gerard143]

I am curious as I am building a new movie server, does the GPU play a role in ripping? Would spec'ing a higher end GPU card result in better ripping performance? I assume this is all irrelevant as I am just copying data when doing a 1:1 rip, so optical speed and drive speed are really the only two that matter much??


The second part of this is streaming..... I will be streaming these rips to Apple TV 4k (latest version) thru something like plex, emby, infuse mainly. Not sure the apple tv can handle the uncompressed bitstream or if transcoding would be required. If transcoding on the fly is required I assume this is where the graphics card would kick in. But then again maybe it wouldn't because plex, etc is just pulling the stream right off the network, there is no direct connection i'll have from video card hdmi output to tv.

[Billycar11]

Gpu plays no part in ripping only playback if you plan to do that on a PC make sure it supports H.265 decoding and at least HDMI 2.0 to get HDR

Apple tv junk cant do Atmos correctly.
Plex can use GPUs to live transcode but you don't want that.

[gerard143]

So what’s your player recommendation?

[dcoke22]

Near as I can tell, there's no perfect streaming-box-as-a-Plex-client (with the exception, perhaps, of a dedicated HTPC, which has its own problems). If you already have an Apple TV 4K, it'll be a reasonable place to start.

On the topic of GPUs, Billycar11 is correct; the GPU doesn't matter at all for ripping. It does matter for playback on a PC. It might matter if you choose to do transcoding before you put stuff on a Plex server. And it can matter a lot if the Plex server has to transcode on the fly to clients.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002 ... streaming/

Is your server going to run Windows? Is it going to be on a recent Intel CPU? Are you going to transcode blu-ray rips before they go in your library?

[gerard143]

Basically I am starting from scratch for the server. It’s a blank slate. Total budget for it up to about 4 grand I guess. I have a ton to learn. I’ve been spending the last two days researching about 8 hours a day.

Thinking about 6-16 TB drives to start. Processor will either be a 12th i9 intel or Xeon processor.

Long story short I want to stream this movie collection to Apple TV’s I have all over home. It’s become my main method for viewing everything. I want a nice looking interface. Something like kodi, infuse, Emby.  Plex is so popular but gotta admit I’m not super huge on interface.

I realizes most players have constraints.  Apple TV, shield, roku, shield, etc.   Most of the time this will be fine.  I can live without atmos.  

That being said, I certain cases, I also want to be able to watch this movie collection with exact same quality and audio formats as if I was putting a physical disc in the UHD player.

All these players seem to have limitations. Apple TV. Shield. Etc.

If I build this server as dual purpose, both with a large drive Array and a high end Nvidia GPU and use the hdmi out on the card, will I still see limitations like all the alternatives seem to have. Or can I actually play with hdr, Dolby vision, atmos, 3D, etc just like I was playing a disc in a disc player?

If so then this is what I will do. From there, I can easily distribute the video stream into a 4k video matrix and then send it to every tv in the house. Not sure what app I would use for the front end player on the PC though to access the library in a nice looking fashion like infuse, etc.

I also assume that transcoding on the fly would be a breeze for a high end NVidia card?

But then that leaves the question of streaming to the Apple TV’s. Do I need to transcode to a compressed version prior? Or can something like plex, Emby, infuse loaded on this server handle streaming these uncompressed 1:1rips on the fly and send it over the network?

I am thinking I have to run windows for all this. Or maybe unraid with windows as a virtual machine.


Man so maybe variables. Tons to learn. Trying to wrap my head around it all.

This reply probably deserves its own thread lol.

[dcoke22]

Infuse is only a front end. It can connect to a Plex Media Server. So you can use Infuse, the Plex client, or a web browser with Plex server.

You can use Infuse with files on a SMB share if you like. Or probably with just about any DLNA server.

Or there's Emby, or Kodi, or any number of ways to host your media files. Personally, I have Plex server, so it is what I have experience with.


I was partway through a long response with thoughts about CPUs, GPUs, hard drives and the like… but based on where you are in this process, I have a suggestion.

Don't buy anything yet.

Take an old computer if you have one or your existing computer if you just have one and install Plex server (or whatever) on it. Rip a few movies and put them into Plex and see how it works.

My current Plex setup is running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a couple of USB hard drives plugged in. This serves 4K movies (via Direct Play) to my Apple TV just fine. Even the 60FPS version of Gemini Man worked fine via Infuse.

I have friends that run Plex on an old Windows computer they had lying around. I have some that run it on a modern Synology. I have some that run it on an Unraid server running on an old bazillion core Xeon CPU with over 180TB of storage shucked out of Western Digital USB drives. I'm transitioning my Plex setup to a TrueNAS server on an Alder Lake 12400 6-core i5.

The point is, myself and everyone I know wouldn't have made the right hardware choice for their circumstances at the beginning. We had to figure out what our needs were from actually trying to use it for a while.

[dcoke22]

I also assume that transcoding on the fly would be a breeze for a high end NVidia card?

Generally speaking, Intel Quick Sync Video hardware encoding performance is the same regardless of which specific CPU you have (for a given architecture version). Said another way, the cheapest Alder Lake CPU with QSV encoding has similar performance as the most expensive CPU with QSV.

Xeon chips probably don't have QSV support at all.

This is true for Nvidia as well. The hardware encoding performance of a Nvidia GTX 1660 is the same as a Nvidia RTX 3090. The Ampere architecture has the same nvenc hardware as the Turing architecture and they all have similar performance.

[gerard143]

Right now I have some movie files on my Mac mini that I can watch thru infuse, emby or plex. I have all 3 of those apps.

Currently they play fine, However I have not ripped anything yet and tried higher quality versions of these movie files. Reason being no drive connected to the Mac.

I did just order two pioneer bdr-s12UHT drives. I guess I can get an enclosure and rip some discs and see how it goes first as you recommend.



Also thank you for the info on encoding performance. So how does encoding performance of cpu processor compare directly to what a gpu processor could do. I assume the gpu is going to be better then what the cpu can do?

[dcoke22]

But then that leaves the question of streaming to the Apple TV’s. Do I need to transcode to a compressed version prior? Or can something like plex, Emby, infuse loaded on this server handle streaming these uncompressed 1:1rips on the fly and send it over the network?

Plex (and probably the others) can do this based on the capabilities of the client and the network connection. As I've mentioned, Plex calls this Direct Play. Assuming your client can do this (the current Apple TV 4K can [and the previous one too IIRC]), then network speeds matter.

Generally speaking, when you're talking about 4K rips, wifi is probably not fast enough or consistent enough. There are always exceptions of course, but for most people, putting things on 1GB ethernet (or better) is usually the best bet. My Apple TV and Plex server are on 1GB ethernet. This can support 1 stream of a 4K rip via Direct Play, but it probably could not support 2 streams at the same time. I only have 1 4K TV, so it doesn't matter for me.

[dcoke22]

Also thank you for the info on encoding performance. So how does encoding performance of cpu processor compare directly to what a gpu processor could do. I assume the gpu is going to be better then what the cpu can do?

This is a big topic. Hardware encoders are limited to doing whatever the hardware can do. For instance, the capabilities of Intel Quick Sync Video have changed with the Intel architecture. But the encoder for a given architecture can only do whatever that encoder can do. Software encoders that run on the CPU, however, keep evolving and getting better.

it is an oversimplification but a software encoder can be made to produce higher quality output for a given codec than a hardware encoder at the expense of needing a lot of CPU cycles to do it. A hardware encoder is optimized for the task and can do it with less energy and in less wall clock time (usually), but the output is only has good as the hardware allows.

Practically speaking, for things like h.264 (and even h.265 on modern hardware), most people would be hard pressed to see difference between a good hardware encoder like modern Intel QSV or Nvidia nvenc, or the best output from a software encoder. And the hardware encoder would do it in less time with less heat and noise while leaving the CPU free.

[gerard143]

Great info from you both!

I keep seeing that direct play term. Thanks for the link. I assumed it was an untouched original version that hasn’t been transcoded. It sounds like that is the case.

[Opentoe]

I've had several Roku's, several Apple TV's, several Dune players, just about every type of media player out there. Right now I use my Denon receiver to decode all my audio. Right now I have been using the latest Nvidia Shield Pro. Since it has a 1Gb port and has great decoding capability as does my Nvidia RTX-3090 GPU I can stream high bitrate content with no transcoding. Nothing looks better than an original. The Roku can really only go up to 40Mb/s ( says it in their own specification files ) so when I try to play a high bitrate on the Roku Ultra it will crash and then reboot. I use Plex exclusively and have been tinkering with Emby a little bit. Of course I use audio passthru. It takes a good configuration to directly stream an 100Mb/s bitrate media file straight through. Really need to make sure your network is up to par and can handle the sustained speeds. Most people come back and tell me they stream direct all the time, but then when I see their logs or screenshots their audio is always being transcoded. Sometimes the audio itself can be 40 to 50Mb/s alone. Yes, the GPU does help in streaming. When I use Xmedia Recode to take a 60GB M2TS file to make it into MKV or MP4 it takes just a few minutes. Not 3 hours like handbrake does. Good luck.

[dcoke22]

When I use Xmedia Recode to take a 60GB M2TS file to make it into MKV or MP4 it takes just a few minutes. Not 3 hours like handbrake does. Good luck.

Modern Handbrake does support hardware encoders. I'd bet you could achieve similar results with Handbrake as you do with XMedia Recode. In any case, if you've got a process that works there's no need to change it.

I hadn't heard of XMedia Recode before. Thank you for making me aware of it.