Per my previous post, I’m working on updating my server that’s running a J3455 Celeron with 16gigs of ram.
Goals:
- Support at least six hard drives (currently have six drives in software RAID 6). Can move 7th main drive to nvme.
- Be faster at transcoding video. This is primarily so I can use PhotoPrism for video clips. Real-time transcoding 4K 80mbps video down to something streamabke would be nice. Despite getting QuickSync to work on the Celeron, I can’t pull more than 20fps unless I drop the output to like 640x480. Current build has no PCIe x16 slot.
- Energy efficiency. Trying to avoid a dedicated video card.
- Support more RAM. Currently maxed at 16gb.
- Price: around $500
- Server-grade hardware would be nice, but I want newer versions of quicksync and can’t afford newer server hardware. Motherboard choice is selected primarily because of chipset, number of SATA ports, and I found one open box.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/JX2gHG
Hoping to move my main drive to the NVME and keep the other six drives as-is without needing a reinstall.
Thoughts?
Right you are!
Dug into it a little more. There were some ffmpeg flags that weren’t being enabled by the latest release of Photoprism. Had to move to the test build. https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/discussions/4093
While it’s faster than real time now, Photoprism still won’t start streaming until the preview is fully generated, so longer video clips can take a minute or two to start playing. It only has to happen once per file, but it’s still annoying. There’s a feature to pre-transcode video, but it’s only to get in to a streamable format. It doesn’t check bitrate/size until you actually start to play.
I might write a script to pre-generate the preview files, but either way, I don’t think I need to upgrade the server quite yet.
Glad I could save you some money :)