Thank you for sharing your experience. Seems like this is not relevant to your setup & usecase.

People who need this know who they are. Not everything is for everybody.

What is the use case?

I'd argue this is for nobody haha

Nobody using jellyfin plex or whatever needs it: they should just use software transcoding, it's better in pretty much every way.

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steelbrain 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I've traveled around a lot in the past couple years so my situation (read: homelab equipment) has been changing and my usecase has been changing with it. It started out as:

- I dont want to unplug the GPU from my gaming PC and plug it into my linux server

- Then: I dont want to figure out PCI forwarding, I'll just open a port and nfs to the containers/vms (ffmpeg-over-ip v4 needed shared filesystem)

- Now: I have a homelab of 4 mini PCs and one of them has an RTX 3090 over Oculink. I need it for local LLMs but also video encoding and I dont want to do both on the same machine.

But you've asked a more fundamental question, why would people need hardware accelerated video decoding in the first place? I need it because my TV doesn't support all the codecs and I still want to watch my movies at 4K without stuttering.

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doctorpangloss 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You can transcode in realtime in software to your TV. You don't need the GPU at all. Even on ancient USFF PCs.

	▲	selcuka 25 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> You can transcode in realtime in software Sometimes you want faster-than-realtime encoding, such as when backing up your video archive.
	▲	steelbrain 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'll tell my TV you said that and I'll see if it stops buffering during playback :)