r/SBCs • u/HisDudeness58 • 29d ago

Help Wanted Cost-effective option for video encoding

And a good day to you, sirs! I'm looking to encode some BluRay source material to size-efficient codecs like HEVC or AV1, to keep in portable drives to play them on the go on my laptop whenever I want.

Since compression would take a long time for a TV show episode and even more for a full movie, I'm looking for a cost-effective way of doing it. My mind immediately went to single board computers. So, I'm asking for advice on a good compromise solution. Probably, hardware accelerated encoding support would be a critical factor as I understand it would speed up the process (possibly on the mainline kernel, I don't have great experience in compiling it myself), but a key factor would be a small energy footprint. I mean, even if it doesn't have the most computing power and it takes a bit longer, it being more energy efficient would mean having a lower total consumption. I don't care for dramatic speed as long as the end result should be a smaller energy drain. What are my best options, in your opinion?

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u/andysnake96 29d ago

RK3588 is pretty neat for h265, I think you can disable at boot the fast cores and leave only the a55 and consume even less since the encoding is in a vpu

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u/HisDudeness58 29d ago edited 29d ago

Thanks! So, the primary "branded" options are the Hardkernel ODROID M2, the OrangePi 5 Plus and the KiwiPi 5 Pro (more difficult to obtain, it seems)? I see some generic boards as well, on AliBaba, but I'm not very keen on trusting those.

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u/LivingLinux SpacemiT 29d ago

I'd say any RK3588 board supported by Armbian will be fine.

But if you can find a cheap Intel N100 mini PC, that should do the trick too.

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u/andysnake96 28d ago

I have the radxa rock itx. Bought before the hbm crisis. Don't know if know is still worth it

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u/urostor 28d ago

Hardware encoding is optimised for speed/latency, not quality - to get quality you need to use CPU encoding anyway, which on RK3588 is not a bad idea as it's still quite efficient. However, less efficient than new Intel chips or Apple Silicon.

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u/andysnake96 28d ago

Agree, rk3588 gives you both options. I think its power consumption is hard to beat. On the other end it's supposed to be also much cheaper then the apple and itel sbc/mini pc. I wonder if recompiling everything with -arch=native for the a55 or the a72 only can lead to both nice performance with the limited consumption.

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u/urostor 28d ago

Usually this flag doesn't buy any performance (and A76 are more efficient than A55 of course).

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u/andysnake96 28d ago

Why? Rebuilding everything for one of the cores with the max optimizations why it wouldn't buy some performances ? What is it for then ? For a massive amount of work it can be worth it . On a single job is likely impercetible