Subsonic Forum

I have a I5 2600k, was just curious if anyone has got hardware encoding to work with subsonic? It would be awesome to take advantage of intels quick sync to transcode the video to stream and keep the cpu usage at virtually nothing.

The video transcoding is not done by subsonic itself, but by ffmpeg, which as far as I can tell does not currently support quick sync.

I've read conflicting things about the ease of that happening in the future, but it seems like x264 was able to incorporate it so there may be some hope yet.

I apologize I wasn't clear in my asking. I know that the the transcoding is done by ffmpeg and that as of current it doesnt support quick sync. I was just curious if anyone had luck getting VLC or mediacoder (supports quick sync) to play nice with subsonic. I am trying to get my hands on a trial of mediacoder cli (the command line version, the sites link to it is down.....*shakes head*)

As for VLC, it does a great job transcoding the files but fails to stop upon logout so it keeps the cpu pressed till its manually killed.

I would love to offload the video work from the cpu to gpu as I dont use the IG for anything as it stands right now, wasted processing power.

Interesting idea. Offloading the transcoding to the GPU would be helpful if it can be set up. It took me quite a while to figure out upgrading ffmpeg to use more than one core for the transcoding video. That one step had a dramatic effect on video performance. Adding the gpu into the mix should be just as helpful while lowering the cpu load. Even though my servers don't have very much gpu power, it is just sitting idle as they are all headless.

GJ51 wrote:It took me quite a while to figure out upgrading ffmpeg to use more than one core for the transcoding video.

Whoa! This is something i've been looking to do forever! Video streaming is useless to me when ffmpeg is only spawning one thread and using one core of my Q6600 CPU. All my media is 720p or better so I need much more horsepower to stream it on the fly.

So i've replaced the ffmpeg.exe with the latest binary but its still only spawning one instance when I play a video. What more needs to be done?

I'm not sure about other platforms but on my Windows 64 bit box here's what I did:

ffmpeg - go to http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ and download the latest static build for your system. This site is for Windows builds. Check http://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html for other OS's. I just extracted the ffmpeg.exe and replaced the file in C:\Subsonic\transcode


After installing the newer ffmpeg it started using more than one core if needed to keep up with the transcoding. All my spinning wheels stopped and everything ran smooth as glass. I have lots of video on my site if you want to see the results. Link is at the bottom.

I'm also using JW 5.7

To update JW Player to the newest version, go to http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5977

and read the instructions. Read the whole thread as you'll see there is the long way and the short way. I use the method I suggested as it seemed to be less time consuming. IF I want to know what version of the player I'm running, I'll just fo a right click on the installed player and it will tell me what version it is.

I just downloaded JW 5.7, extract player.swf, rename it to the current name in the subsonic/jetty/xxxx/webapp/flash folder and replace the original file. Rename JW Player 5.4 to Old JW Player 5.4. then drop player.swf into the directory and rename it to JW Player 5.4 when you're done it'll be named 5.4 but if you right click on it in SS you'll se that it's really 5.7

Damn. Thats what I already did to no avail. I'm running it on Windows as well but 32-bit Windows Home Server so I got the latest 32-bit static build: FFmpeg git-9251942 32-bit Static (Latest)

I'll do some testing on my 64-bit desktop tomorrow and see what happens.

I got my build from http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

Don't know if there all the same or not, but my video works really well, even on my EVO 4g if I have a good connection over 3g, no problems at all over wifi.

Installed the latest Subsonic in my Windows 7 x64 box, updated ffmpeg (latest 64bit static build) as well as JW player. Added 1080p MKV (90% of my media is this) to it an still no-go. Only one instance of ffmpeg is spawned to transcode it and of course it chokes on it. Pegs one of my 4 CPU cores which is obviously not enough...

Bleh. Tell me your secrets! XD

I don't know what else I can tell you. i was having similar issues with 1080p files pausing all the time until I replaced the ffmpeg with the version I downloaded from the site I posted.

Here's my transcoding string:

ffmpeg -ss %o -i %s -async 30 -b %bk -r 23.976 -s %wx%h -ar 44100 -ac 2 -v 0 -f flv -

My public server is running WHS 2011 in a 2GB Virtual machine on my Primary server which is a Xeon quad core socket 775 2.83Ghx cpu with 8GB ram running Server 08 R2.

The formatting to mkv was done with AVS video converter retaining original quality. I'll try to do another Blue Ray to MKV to see if it works as well as IronMan2 did. Usually I just reformat my HQ video to mp4 so that it can just pass to JW Player without transcoding.