I’ve got an old AMD Phenom II system in a 2U rackmount case that I want to run Jellyfin on. I need to add a graphics card so I can hook a monitor to it for troubleshooting etc., so I figure while I’m at it I ought to find something I can pass through for hardware-accelerated transcoding.
I use Linux and I prefer open-source drivers, so I’ve initially limited my consideration to AMD. Based on this page in the Jellyfin documentation, it sounds like I need GCN 5 (Vega) or newer for acceleration on Linux with the open-source driver, or GCN 1 or newer for acceleration on Windows with a closed source driver (not sure if that includes Windows in a VM on Proxmox?).
Needing a low-profile card really limits my options. Looking at Ebay etc., the ones with decent availability include:
- FirePro W2100 (GCN 1) (~$12)
- Radeon R5 430 (GCN 1) (~$12)
- Radeon R7 450 (GCN 1) (~$30)
- Radeon Pro WX 2100 (GCN 4) (~$35)
- Radeon RX 550 (GCN 4) (~$45)
- Radeon Pro WX 4100 (GCN 4) (~$70)
- Radeon RX 6400 (RDNA 2) (~$130)
Then I noticed a caution on the Jellyfin documentation page:
Most AMD dGPUs come with video encoders but be careful with certain models - RX 6400/6500 series don’t have video encoders.
So that eliminates the only GCN 5+ low-profile card that AMD has apparently ever made, which means there is no such thing as a low-profile AMD card that both supports VA-API and has a video encoder? Is that really true that AMD went the five years between the WX 2100 in 2017 and the RX 6400 in 2022 without releasing a single low-profile card suitable for Jellyfin??
As for Nvidia, I’m starting from scratch because I haven’t bought an Nvidia card in probably 20+ years. According to the Nvidia Jellyfin documentation, apparently transcoding requires the proprietary driver and a card that’s Maxwell (1st gen) or better, HEVC requires Maxwell (2nd gen) or Pascal depending on bit depth, and AV1 requires really new stuff that’s probably out of my budget.
Nvidia low-profile cards AFAIK include:
- Quadro K620 (~$25)
- Quadro K1200 (~$40)
- Quadro P400 (~$50)
- Quadro P600 (~$60)
- GT 1030 (~$70)
- GTX 750 (~$100)
- GTX 1050 Ti (~$100)
- Quadro P1000 (~$150)
- T400 (~$160)
- GTX 1650 (~$200)
- RTX A2000 (~$300)
TLDR: so it seems like my options are basically to get an AMD FirePro W2100 or Radeon R5 430 for $12 and resort to running Jellyfin in a Windows VM, to get a Quadro K620 for $25 and resort to using the proprietary Nvidia driver, spend way more than it’s worth for anything that can do HEVC (let alone AV1), or scrap the whole CPU/mobo/RAM and upgrade to something with modern integrated graphics?
Do you actually need hardware transcoding for your media is the real question. I haven’t bothered with 4K content so maybe that’s why but I’ve never used a GPU on any media server be it plex since the early days or jellyfin the past few years. Never ran into a situation where I couldn’t play a video file properly on any of my devices.
Are you trying to solve a problem with playback of video content or just want it for the sake of having it? If it’s the later I’d say to not bother especially if your budget is low. At some point you may actually need it at which point you can plan the hardware more appropriately.
Yes, I’ve noticed in particular that some of my content won’t play on my Android phone.
…Now that I think about it, maybe the real problem is that my phone sucks!
I do have a little bit of 4K HEVC that everything has problems with (phone, Roku, and even playing through the browser lags on Chromium and gives a “this client isn’t compatible with the media” error on Firefox), but not enough yet to really justify buying hardware instead of just making a 1080p version manually.
You might need to get multiple copies of media for different devices. Example, on my 1080p TV I can not watch the 4k streams due to my network sucking, but the 1080 stream works just fine. 👍