Hardware Acceleration: Why Would Synology Remove It? (Benefits + Jellyfin Setup)

Hardware acceleration is good right yes but do you know why that's the issue that I ran into for a long time I knew Hardware acceleration was good but I didn't exactly know why so in this video I'm going to quickly explain what Hardware acceleration is how it works then show you a test setup using jelly fin on a sonology Nas and finally we're going to explain why a lot of sonology Nas devices do not support Hardware acceleration and what you can do as an alternative if you really want to use Hardware acceleration so let's take a look at what Hardware acceleration is so Hardware acceleration in the simplest of terms will convert a video format it could be a codec it could be a resolution but what it will do is it will convert that into a format that can be played on whatever client device you're using so for example if you're using a laptop it might support different codecs than if you're using a mobile phone so that alone can potentially cause Hardware transcoding to be required depending on which device you're using now whether you know it or not transcoding is always used it just might not be efficient so if you're using a mobile phone and you go to play a video and it's not in a format that's capable of actually direct playing what it will do is actually transcode but it's going to use the CPU as opposed to the GPU so we'll get to that in a second but what I quickly want to show here is that there are a few types of transcoding and the IDE aidea is that if you're direct playing a video file and there's no transcoding required it will directly play off of the device that means that if you implement transcoding Hardware transcoding you're not going to see any benefit because it's direct playing directly off of your device and you're not really doing any processing on the server so where you get into issues is if you have to it's really mainly if you have to transcode the file so the video stream audio is is easier on the CPU at least in my experience than video but the idea here is that if you're in a situation where you have to transcode it's going to be done whether you set up Hardware transcoding to use the GPU or you don't now one myth is that Hardware acceleration will always lead to better performance and it's just simply not true so if you have your Nas set up and it's streaming to a TV for example and it never has to trans code because your TV has the correct code X and it's in the correct resolution then you will not benefit whatsoever from Hardware acceleration so it's not something that has to be implemented for everybody if you're direct playing this is going to produce absolutely nothing for you so what I want to do is show you this in real time and show you a video file that will not transcode or doesn't have to be transcoded and then the same video file in a format that does have to be transcoded what it does to arseny Nas and then we'll go and quickly turn on hardware transcoding and then we'll see how it plays then so what I have here is I have my sonology Nas using jelly Fin and I have Hardware acceleration set up this is a DS 1019 plus it's older um it's showing its age at this point so it's not the best from a performance perspective but what you'll see here and we will look at the setup in a little bit uh but I have Hardware acceleration turned off so we're going to go back to a video from your favorite YouTuber that you're not subscribed to and we're going to play it and what you're going to see is that the format that we're using is 4K and everything is streaming properly this is the video I put out last week everything is streaming properly no problems whatsoever so at this point what I did is I came in and I changed the quality down to 480p and what you'll see here on the left hand side with this transcoding info is that we are in fact transcoding the video so you'll see that it's playing but it's stuttering it's buffering so right now it started to play it stopped and it's going to buffer it's going to keep playing and then it's going to stop right there there we go so it stopped again and if you go to the Nas and you check out the actual performance of it you're going to see that the CPU this is the CPU the CPU is pegged close to 100% right now so what's happening is the CPU is transcoding this file and it's just not capable of doing it now this is where we get get into the situation where not all sonology Nas devices will support Hardware acceleration I will explain why a little later in this video but this specific device does so on our Ness I went in and configured jelly fin to use Hardware acceleration I have a full written tutorial that will walk through this entire process so I don't want to bog down this video with it but the idea is that we're basically adding the actual device to our jelly fin container which is is so much easier using container manager because you can do it all through Docker compose but we're adding it to our jelly fin container so that we can then utilize it inside of jelly fin when we go to configure it there is some other stuff here um just so you're aware this is just the media this is where all of my media exists so realistically if you were to copy this entire thing and just change this path here to your media your jelly fin container would work assuming that you have a device that supports Intel Quicks sync but like I said we'll get to that in a second so we have it configured and then on our jelly fin server what we're going to do is we're going to select Intel Quicks sync and then these options can be modified depending on whatever uh processor is in your server but then we're going to save this okay so then as soon as it saves what we'll do is we will go back okay so at this point we have Hardware acceleration on but we're utilizing the GPU we're playing the exact same video that we played before but you'll see there's no stutters we are in fact transcoding it and if we go back to our Nas you'll see that our CPU utilization is down to 23% so we're utilizing the GPU in this case which basically will offload all of the actual processing from the CPU to the GPU so the CPU will be more efficient and the GPU which is realistically not being used will actually be used to transcode this video so keep in mind think about what I'm showing you here we are playing a video in 480p and we're transcoding it which means that playing the video in 480p was actually harder on the server than playing the video in 4k so if we go back to 4K here okay so we are back to 4K we're playing the video and absolutely no transcoding is being done so what I want to point out and I think that this is why Hardware Exel acceleration is confusing to a lot of people when you are streaming a YouTube video or you're streaming TV whatever it is we we're in this digital age now where everything is streamed when you go down in resolution it's generally better performing and the reason is because you're generally running into a bandwidth problem so YouTube is doing all this crazy stuff server side but on the client side the biggest issue you'll run into is generally bandwidth related so when you lower the quality you're actually lowering the bandwidth requirement so it's easier to stream when you're transcoding trying to play a video in 480p in your head might be easier but on the server side it's actually harder so your goal is to direct play and if that doesn't work to obviously transcode it uh but transcoding is more efficient with the GPU than it is with the CPU now keep in mind when I say that I mean on individual devices so this ds1019 Plus it's easier on the system to transcode it with the GPU utilizing Intel's Quicks sync than it is the CPU but but I want to point this out that does not mean that it's easier to transcode this video with this GPU than a different CPU so if you were comparing if you had two devices and you had Intel's latest i7 processor using that as an example versus the jelly fin server running on your Nas utilizing the I think it's Intel 600 Graphics whatever it is there's almost 0% chance that the GPU on the nas will be better than the CPU on that new latest processor so when we're comparing this we're comparing this to the individual device that it is because other devices might have CPUs that will transcode more efficiently with their CPU than with the actual GPU on this device so for a while there's been a lot of outrage that sonology devices newer sonology devices don't support Intel Quicks sync and it's because they've switched over to AMD and ryzen processors which don't have integrated Graphics but the thing that a lot of people leave out and the first person I heard that said this was a channel called Tech me out um in a DS 923 plus review but when you're utilizing one of son's newer devices that utilize the ryzen processors you are actually utilizing ECC memory so ECC memory is error correcting I don't want to get into it because ECC memory is kind of confusing there's buffered and unbuffered and all different types and the the important part is that the memory tries to actually resolve issues before writing them to disk so when you're utilizing Intel quicksync with an Intel processor you actually don't have ECC memory these devices don't have ECC memory so when you look at it purely from a data Integrity perspective these newer sonology devices are better from an Integrity perspective but they're worse only for hardware transort and worse because they can't do it so you really have to ask yourself do I want better data Integrity on my Nas or do I want to utilize Hardware acceleration and for most people the answer should be you want better data Integrity there are still sonology devices that support uh Hardware acceleration the DS 423 plus is one of the best ones that you can use I think the DS 723 plus can utilize it as well but the point is that you don't have it available on these newer devices but it's better for you whether you know it or not that you don't so let's take a look at what you can actually do if you want wanted to add Hardware acceleration to your you know home network without utilizing your you know new sonology Nest that doesn't support it okay so let's assume that you have a sonology nest that doesn't support Hardware acceleration and for whatever reason it's not performing the way that you need it to so you want to look into alternative options there's two main options that I think most people should use the first is by purchasing something like a Zab board uh the Zab board the thing with the Zemo board is that it's overpriced for what you're getting if I'm being honest the benefit to it is that you are really easily able to configure Hardware acceleration so the Z board comes configured with Casa OS on I have created a few videos on Casa OS but the thing that's nice with it is that you can install Jelly fin or Plex or whatever it is directly through Casa OS and if you look at the settings you'll see that it's passing the GPU with quicksync through to the container so they're Docker containers and it's configured by default you would basically purchase this add your media to it and then you would just install the jelly fin or Plex application or I think they even have MB uh but you'd install it and Hardware acceleration would work by default okay so that is the first option the second option would be to utilize a Mini PC so this is a gmk tech knockbox G3 the benefit to this device is that it is significantly more power ful than the Zab board is it comes with an n100 processor um it's significantly more powerful and it's cheaper purely from a hardware perspective it is a better overall option form factor is a little it's a little bigger uh but purely Hardware it is a better option downside is that you have to configure it however you want so you can install something like Ubuntu server on it and then you can install Plex or MB or jellyfin whatever you want to use you can install it directly on here you can also install Casa OS if you really wanted to on this knockbox and that would work as well it's just that the compatibility you might run into some issues I can't guarantee that you won't uh you might run into some issues because Kasa OS is not designed for this specific knockbox it's just a operating system that can be installed directly on Debian based uh Linux distributions those are two decent options for transparency I was sent both of these devices I'm not telling you you should use one or the other I'm just saying that they are two options that are relatively inexpensive we'll say between1 and $120 but they're relatively inexpensive and they'll allow you to utilize quicksync if you want to keep the media on the nest another thing to mention is that you can mount a uh folder through S SMB and keep the media on the Nas and then at that point you would just basically stream it from the nas to the actual uh device running your media server and then you would connect to it through whatever client device you have that over complicates it a little being honest because now we're adding a bunch of different devices but I don't want to give sonology a pass that is your decision to make they do offer devices that you can still utilize Intel quicksync so if you are in the market for a device and you want it to be a media server first you might want to look at the DS4 23 plus and just purchase that say as opposed to the s923 plus which does not support Hardware acceleration but you're giving up data Integrity Flatout R ECC memory is superior to non ECC memory from a Nas and data storage perspective and if all of that doesn't work for you try and get the video file to be in a format that your device your client device can play in directly because then at that point you don't have to worry about transcoding at all and it'll just play it and you won't have any problems whatsoever that is option C D I don't know so like I said I have written instructions for jelly Fin and Hardware acceleration that I'll leave in the description of the video if you want to configure it and you have a Nas that supports it you can follow that tutorial utilizing container manager and it will be configured if you have any questions though please feel free to leave them in the comments and if you like this type of content please consider subscribing to the channel thanks guys

Channel: WunderTech

Views: 3,509

Keywords: synology hardware acceleration, synology hardware transcoding, synology jellyfin, synology plex, synology emby

Id: cFKFkg4sIa4

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023