Transcoding hardware recommendations for mpeg2 to h.264

Sir Ket

I'm currently building out my Kodi/TVHeadend environment and was looking for some guidance on transcoding hardware requirements/recommendations.

Specifically- I'm looking to transcode 4 mpeg2 streams into h.264 (basic transcoding into whatever format is going to be simplest- recommendations here would also be appreciated). How much memory should I expect to need per stream? What processor(s) do I need to spec out (or conversely, how many streams can I expect to transcode for a given type of processor)? Are GPU's supported for transcoding and if so- which are going to give me the best bang for my buck?

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Kevin Dixon

Did you figure this out?

I use the transcoding for one tv in the house and it works great. Our firestick doesn't seem to like the default MPEG streams; it would stutter a lot. But 1080 mkv movies are smooth. So, I transcode the live tv to 720 mkv and it plays fine.

One 1080 MPEG tv channel transcoded to 720 MKV uses roughly 50% of my G3220 Pentium processor. Transcoding to 480 used less, I think it was 25-30% if I remember correctly. 1080 MPEG to 1080 MKV (just for fun) used 90-100% and caused buffering on the tv.

I just send the straight mpeg stream from tvheadend to the livingroom tv.

My plan was to use this information and passmark scores to figure out what cpu I wanted to upgrade to. In the end, I decided that my current setup is low power and working fine so until I add a tv or something I'm just sticking with it.

I'm no transcoding expert but thought I would share my experience. Hope it helps.