Intel Quick Sync¶

Media servers do not need to super power beasts of systems. For example, an 8th gen Intel CPU ran in Alex's Example PMS Build for years now although more recently an upgrade to a 13th gen Intel i5-13600k CPU took place.

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

Which CPU is the best?¶

Best is of course a subjective term. But over the first half over 2024, Alex and a big chunk of the self-hosting community ran hundreds of CPU tests to benchmark QSV in the first public test of its type. For full thoughts, see the blog post.

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.