I was having some dropped frame issues on my PC, and my phones video is pretty much unusable so I figured its probably a lack of hardware acceleration. Is it worth it to buy an Intel A380 which I've found for $120, or is it not worth it? For reference I currently have an i5 8600k and 16gb of RAM running Ubuntu Server headlessly.

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[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey, I bought one actually because I have a media server + I will soon have 4, h265 camera streams that I want simultaneously if needed. Right now, I have no GPU and my CPU will struggle with some h265 encoded media if it is higher quality.

The problem right now is that Debian and thus, Ubuntu Server don't ship with a latest 6.2+ kernel. Only 6.1. Since I use ZFS for all of my storage that has to be compiled with the kernel, I don't want to hack my way around a custom kernel version + a custom ZFS build for something I want reliability on.

Currently kernel 6.4 is Trixie(testing) repo before it gets put in backports for debian. Jellyfin recommends 6.2+ and I don't even know if it will work for trancoding before that.

I don't know how kernel releases work in Ubuntu server, but that is importent to know before you buy. (Edit: actuually, maybe I will switch to Testing to get that kernel update and already use the GPU to test)

That stuff out of the way, the A380 is literally on par with the RTX 3090 for h265 encoding at release and is the cheapest AV1 transcoder right now. It competes with the best encoders for $150. That is really a good value even if it isn't a good gaming GPU.