The problem with those inexpensive Ryzens is that they don't have iGPUs with Intel QuickSync so they can't transcode video with high efficiency. This makes them unsuitable for use for media servers, which is what a lot of people are doing with these chips these days: building home NAS/media servers that combine both functions into a single, small, low-power unit. You put a bunch of HDDs in it so you can store tens of terabytes of movies using RAID to protect against drive failures, and run Jellyfin or Plex on it. Plus you can use the box for other regular NAS tasks too, as well as many other convenient applications. Intel chips are virtually required here since AMD chips are useless for transcoding, and require external GPU cards which destroy the system's power efficiency which was one of the main points of getting one of these low-power Intel chips in the first place.
I run Jellyfin on an 8-year-old Intel NUC. Works great. Don't need to worry about transcoding on the fly because I make sure all video files are in H264 going in, which can be direct-streamed to pretty much all clients.
>Don't need to worry about transcoding on the fly because I make sure all video files are in H264 going in, which can be direct-streamed to pretty much all clients.
That doesn't work if you use subtitles. With many formats, the subtitles have to be transcoded on-the-fly into the video, even if the source and destination resolution and codec are the same.
Also, the Intel NUC might be fine just running Jellyfin (without transcoded subtitles) using separate file storage, but if you try to combine that with a NAS box running 4-8 drives using ZFS and perhaps a few other services as well, it's probably just not enough.
Transcoding using hardware acceleration is one of those things that some people insist upon, like wanting "gaming" everything and overclocking everything, but most people don't need.
First, the quality of output of hardware accelerated transcoding is in most instances noticeably worse than CPU transcoding, as in most people can discern the difference watching two videos side-by-side.
Second, CPU transcoding is more than enough to keep up with most streams. For instance, 1920x1080 h.264 streams can be done in real time by even a modest 4 core processor. People who want 4K h.265 can buy a fancier CPU.
Third, most people are served perfectly fine by pre-transcoded files. Your comment about subtitles isn't correct - most streaming devices can accept subtitle metadata, and even if subtitles need to be burned in, they can be burned in to a static file and/or generated in real time by a CPU.
What's interesting is that the same people who want Intel Quicksync claim they want to transcode to the best quality that a device can support, then say they don't want to transcode to a static file because they don't want to transcode to a lower resolution / bitrate than what their best device can support, but want to be able to view things at the highest quality wherever they want. They've been tricked, because if they really cared about quality, they'd care about the difference in quality between QuickSync and CPU encoding.
That's why I tell people that if the really want highest quality real time transcoding and have sources that are ultra high quality, they'd be much happier with a Ryzen 7900 than with Intel QuickSync. Side-by-side comparisons would bear this out every time.
I too don’t understand the need for transcoding if the goal is to get best quality. Any transcoding will reduce quality, and given the capability of modern players, the best quality is just the original media file.
You are comparing a cpu that (... checks google ...) retails for $368 _by itself_ against one that comes in entire-system-minipcs at $149. Yes, the CPU perf is obviously better. In general HTPCs are setup as: 1) direct play or remux for all the primary usecases 2) optional transcoding
The cpu doesnt generally matter for #1. For #2 you are already making tradeoffs so its a bit of a non-argument that "you are losing quality". Its not the primary usecase (either its other users, or streaming on the go).
While Intel QuickSync remains faster in CPUs of the same generation with AMD, the AMD laptop CPUs starting with Phoenix (Ryzen 7440/7540/7640/7840/7940) have made a great jump in the video encoding/decoding speed, exceeding the older Intel CPUs, and they should be suitable for any such application.
There are a huge number of models of cheap small NUC-like computers with AMD Phoenix or Hawk Point (Ryzen 8000 series) CPUs.
We're kind of stumbling into a golden age of home NAS devices and while there aren't any ready-to-go ECC options yet, you can buy lovely little cases to support your own components. I think we'll surely see ECC in the next generation of AOOSTAR and similar devices, nobody making these devices has any motivation to never implement ECC.
How exactly are companies like AOOSTAR going to implement ECC if it's not supported by the CPU vendor (which is Intel)? AMD CPUs are useless for these home NAS devices if your goal is to build a low-power media server, which I think is one of the main use-cases (why else would you want to store tens of terabytes of data at home?).
ECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th) and before that for AMD I think, so it is only a matter of time before this trickles down into the little NAS boxes.
>ECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th)
It is? How so? I don't see it anywhere outside their server and embedded products. The server-grade stuff isn't appropriate for "the little NAS boxes" used at home because of both expense and more importantly power consumption, and the embedded stuff just isn't really available to consumers (so it might be potentially great for a company like Synology that builds consumer-friendly pre-built NAS boxes running on proprietary software, but it's not useful to people building their own DIY NAS boxes running open-source software).
ECC is supported on any higher end 12th/13th Gen, but it's locked behind a chipset feature lock. If you can find any board that uses W680 (e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569), then it's possible to use ECC UDIMM on Intel Core and have ECC detected/reported.
>e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569
Yeah, that cost puts it out of reach for the typical home users building relatively inexpensive little DIY media server boxes, and places it firmly in "server" territory. A standard motherboard for these CPUs (typically using a B760 chipset) is a very small fraction of that cost.
It's good to know this factoid, but it still basically supports my prior assertion that on Intel, ECC support is basically only for servers.
Of course you can add a GPU card on the PCIe slot, but this 1) takes away a slot, and PCIe lanes, that you might want to use for connecting storage devices (such as a SATA HBA card), and 2) this will probably poorly affect your system's overall power consumption, which is a big factor for home users building NAS/media server boxes. Intel's QuickSync performs extremely well, with very low power (esp at idle) for 4k transcoding, for very low cost, while not needing any PCIe lanes; it's why these CPUs are so popular for this application. Unfortunately, Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips, so that's a big drawback, as ECC is really useful for a storage server (or really anywhere).
It looks like these CPUs were specifically targeted at embedded devices; they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips, and if you look at the desktop variants (the ones without any letter suffixes), they don't support ECC.
> they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips
That's not really relevant to the point of them only allowing ECC on Xeon chips though. They do (or at least did) support ECC on non-Xeon chips.
These days though, people are probably better off buying an appropriate Ryzen processor and motherboard that explicitly supports ECC. That's what I did anyway. :)
Yes, I'd exclude anything on the secondhand market, especially things you have to buy from overseas sellers where there's no possibility of support or returns. This is not like a normal new part where you can purchase it firsthand and expect it to perform as advertised or else get a refund. Furthermore, the (Intel) chipsets on motherboards sold to consumers don't normally support ECC either, so it seems you'd have to get something that's not designed to Intel specifications, probably on Aliexpress, so it's questionable if ECC would even work, and you can certainly forget about any warranty or returns.
Seriously, if you can't just buy it at Best Buy/NewEgg/Amazon (not from 3rd-party overseas sellers), then it's not applicable to this discussion at all.
