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News and Updates

  • 2 min read

End of 2024 update

A quick update post today. The X13SAE-F, Intel i5 13600k build has bedded in quite nicely over the last 6 months. Check out the full details over on the example builds for the exact hardware used.

Besides a minor hiccup with the way Intel handled some QC issues, the chip has performed very well.

The biggest change this year has been a switch out to NixOS from Proxmox. In no small part this was enabled by building a separate virtualisation node based around the excellent Epyc chip - I made a video about this.

NixOS has proven to be a really solid foundation for the media stack and uptime has never been higher thanks to the declarative configurations being self-documenting. And having a separate "playground" allowing me to treat the media server like "pseudo-production".

I continue to post regular videos over on KTZ Systems and the Self-Hosted podcast is still the highlight of my fortnight. Thanks to all of you who watch and/or listen.

Have a great 2025, and watch out for some more Perfect Media Server content coming to a channel near you.

  • 2 min read

Quick Sync Video Testing Results

Back last autumn, I put a call out for some community Quick Sync Video (QSV) testing. The results are now at a point some 8 months later where we can draw some conclusions. I've written up my thoughts in some detail on blog.ktz.me.

Thank you to all of you who ran these tests and made this possible.

  • 2 min read

Quick Sync Video Testing

Quick Sync Video (QSV) is the hardware video transcoding circuitry built into most Intel CPUs for the last few years. Whilst there are many sites which provide benchmarks of the raw performance of a CPUs general processing cores or its iGPU performance for gaming, there isn't a great deal of data on the performance of the QSV hardware.

I am therefore delighted to announce a new project to gather as much data on the performance of QSV as possible. See this YouTube video for more information.

A call to action! Please lend your hardware to support this benchmarking effort.

Further details on running the script itself can be found at blog.ktz.me - benchmarking QSV.

  • 3 min read

The Big 2023 PMS Refresh!

Perfect Media Server as a wiki was first released on New Year's Eve 2020 (or is it the eve of New Year 2021?) - anyway, Dec 31st 2020. Since then I've made small edits and updates to the content as required but overall felt the navigation was a bit cluttered and confusing. With this in mind I've completely reorganised the whole site.

The main landing page is much simpler than it was before using the mkdocs-material-insiders feature of Grids and I've now implemented the brand new "blog" feature. That's what you're reading these news updates via!

Now to talk a bit of shop for a sec. This site doesn't make any money. I don't serve ads and I've made the only donation option of "Buy me a Coffee" in the bottom right, less obtrusive. And yet, I know from the analytics that many thousands of you find this site useful each month. Therefore it seemed only fair that @squidfunk, the developer of the absolutely amazing mkdocs-material theme this site is built around, gets some support to keep building this great documentation system. I have no official affiliation with him or the project, I just really like it. So, to pass some of the value I (you) derive from the project, I've signed up for the monthly sponsors tier on his GitHub.

I really hope that you find some use and utility from this site. If you do and it saves you buying an Unraid license or something and you're able to contribute a few $ for me to pass back upstream to the projects that make this one posssible, that would be pretty cool. It's not my goal for this site to be "profitable", but covering its costs (which it doesn't today) would be nice. In this age of the centralized knowledge and media sites imploding (Twitter / reddit) independently hosted sites like these become even more important in my opinion.

Stay tuned for more updates and content, specifically on YouTube and around NixOS as my journey there continues.

Hope you enjoy the refreshed site!

-Alex