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What scenarios does a home server need a GPU? (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by TaCoDoS2@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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I want to host security cameras and a plex server. Does this mean that my server needs a GPU? (Or would benefit from one). I heard plex does fine with just a CPU

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[–] jerwong@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I use Jellyfin which is similar to Plex. I have it on a Raspberry Pi 4 8 GB. It's perfectly fine if I'm sending H264 but most modern browsers do not support H265 so it forces the server to transcode. That will consume almost all processing power if it's CPU-only and is a very slow process.

[–] agent_kater@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

That will consume almost all processing power if it's CPU-only and is a very slow process.

This is a complicated topic and the terminology is a bit ambiguous.

Yes, non-hardware-accelerated transcoding is slow and will consume the CPU.

However, you don't necessarily need an external GPU to do hardware-accelerated transcoding. When you use Intel QuickSync for example, the codec hardware is part if the CPU. On the other hand it is only in CPUs that have integrated graphics, so you could still say the transcoding is done "by the GPU", just not the additional one that you put in. In fact, putting in a dedicated graphics card often disables the integrated graphics and you have to use tricks to re-enable it before you can use it for transcoding again.

[–] micalm@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Using their desktop client is a solution.