Intel Quick Sync¶

Media servers do not need to super power beasts of systems. Indeed, an 8th gen Intel CPU is what has been running in Alex's Example PMS Build for years now.

Quick Sync has been a game changing technology. It is a hardware media encoder built-in to most modern Intel CPUs. It's capable of encoding 2 or more 4K streams at once which is perfectly sufficent for most use cases.

Performance¶

Performance per watt is class leading too. In our testing it draws 10w or less under full load and 0w at idle. Compare this to a discrete GPU which often requires 20w+ just to sit at idle, never mind under load! Then there's the upfront cost of hardware to support a discrete GPU. You need a motherboard with enough PCIe slots, PSU plugs, a big enough case, and so on. Having the media encoder built-in to the CPU is just so convienent!

Playback¶

Modern applications for media playback like Jellyfin and Plex support QSV for hardware transcoding. Unfortunately Plex lock it behind a paid Plex Pass option but it is well supported.

More info here.