Yeah, but we always run them in native formats, so it’s not a big load on the processor. We only watch the 4K stuff at home where it’s got a hardwired gigabit ethernet connection.

If you saw my other comment, I’m kind of talking myself out of this upgrade since I managed to get qsv working on my current rig.

That shouldn’t be the case. I’d look into getting this fixed properly before spending a ton of money for new hardware that you may not actually need. It smells like to me that encode or decode part aren’t actually being done in hardware here.

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.

Not yet! But I do have a bunch of different apps running, and I’ve always had to baby it. Looking forward to having more room for activities.

I have a media server with over 1000 Blu-ray and DVDs on it (and a few UHDs).

Recommendations: decide if you care about subtitles early. Ripping subtitles off blu ray is a pain in the ass. They’re not stored as text but rather as images, so you need software like SubtitleEdit to OCR those images back into text. It gets it wrong all the time. Ripping off DVD is easy, so I just grab all sub tracks off DVDs.

I have six 8TB drives in a RAID6 configuration using MDADM on a Ubuntu Server box. It’s using a very cheap motherboard with integrated CPU. I had to add a PCI SATA card to have enough ports. Same machine hosts all my photos, security camera footage, and other files.

Movies are ripped on my gaming PC using makemkv and Handbrake. I haven’t bothered finding a method for re-encoding UHD since we’re only going to watch them at home where bandwidth isn’t an issue (so I have like 300GB of LoTR lol). I picked up a bunch of cheap used drives from goodwill (mostly DVD drives), so I’ll queue up 5 or so movies before bed and let it run overnight.

Movies are hosted on Plex and watched on phones, tablets, and AppleTVs around our house.