ffmpeg, CPU load and question about CPU upgrade

Hey guys

I have been using Serviio for more than 1.5 years now, and it is really working well for me. A while ago I saw that some 1080p movies don't want to stream to my Samsung Home Theatre system, without lagging, and buffering. This was really quite a big problem for me. Only some of the movies do this, and it seems it has to do with the way they are encoded.

So yesterday I took one of these big movies, streamed it, and logged onto my Fedora system on which Serviio is running. I saw ffmpeg process taking up 186% of the CPU load.
I have a HP Proliant Microserver, first generation, which has the AMD Athlon II Neo N36L processor in it. This is a dual core CPU, 1.4GHz (if i'm not mistaken). The question I have is this: will my problem be solved if I were to upgrade to the new Microserver, which has the AMD Turion II N54L processor, dual core @ 2.2GHz?

I know the bigger the processor, the better, but will this jump be enough? I don't know to much about video encoding etc. to make this decision on my own, and that's why I came here. I also wanted to know if putting a GFX in the box will solve this issue. I have heard people stating that if you have a gfx in your machine, ffmpeg will automatically use this for processing, but seeing as the "stream" goes through DLNA, and not the GFX output, will this make a difference?

Any help will be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

[atc98092]

I have Serviio running on two computers. One is my main media server, and the other I use for testing profile tweaks and other beta things. My main server has a quad core AMD with 8 gig of ram. I can stream HD video with no issues to all my players from it, including the Roku players. The Rokus in particular require some high power transcoding. My test server only has a dual core AMD (still 8 gig of ram) and the Rokus will sometimes have to buffer the video because the server can't keep up. However, it doesn't happen with all HD video, so it most likely is dependent on the native file encoding. And my SD videos play perfectly from either.

I guess what I am saying is that more cores might be a better answer than just a faster CPU. Even on my quad core server, I will see ffmpeg taking almost all of the CPU power, but everything still runs smoothly. Even if I'm logged into the remote desktop it is still responsive. I can't speak with authority about a gfx taking some of the load, but I seem to recall it being mentioned before that it would have no effect for Serviio. I could be wrong, though!

Thanks for the quick reply!

I agree with the thought of more cores rather than bigger CPU. The problem is, as always, the bank. I can upgrade to a new Proliant Microserver as mentioned, for the equivalent of about US$170 (1700 local currency), but if I want more cores, I'm gonna have to fork out at least US$350-US$400, (+/- 4000 local currency) and then it is entry level i3 stuff. This little gem has been running almost ALL my video without problem, it's only these really big 1080p stuff. I have a nice rig to watch it on, so it's kinda sad that the computer can't keep up. As for the rest of it's duties, I'm more than happy with it.

Bummer, was hoping the new line would be enough. Thank you in any case for your reply, you confirmed what I have feared

Honestly these days it's not so much CPU MHz anymore.

It depends on what instructions are inside the CPU and which ones can be used by the encoding process, GPU encoding/decoding can be massively more efficient because you have lots and lots of cores that can be programed to do 1 thing very very fast.

You might be better off buying a media player type device that can play the formats natively then you don't need to transcode, or re-encode the videos in your library to fit within the profile that works on your TV.

Learn your codecs and the ones that it has trouble decoding in less than real time.