Adding hardware encoder

[zogthegreat]

Hi everyone!

New user to OBS here. I setup OBS on some old hardware to stream some live cam, (pigeons on my balcony). Here's the specs for the machine that's hosting OBS:

SuperMicro X8SIL-F w/ Xeon X3450
Nvidia GTX 560 TI
16gb DDR3 ECC
120gb SSD for OS
2TB HDD for storage.
Asus PCE-AC68 wifi adapter

For the cameras, I'm using Mini Wireless IP Camera:

Mini Wireless IP Camera Full HD 1080P Smart Home Security Camera Night Vision | eBay

High definition full 1080P. Interface Type:Mini 8 Pin USB. 6.Loop-cycle recording saves the storage space efficiently. Color:Black, Red, Blue. 1.120 degree provides you wide view.

www.ebay.com

They work fairly decently for $6.00 cameras. I'm using the USB interface to connect to the host machine.

The machine is in the storage closet on my balcony. I'm running it headless using Windows Remote Desktop to connect. I'm noticing that my CPU usage is running around 40% on all cores and that my GPU is running around 40% also. Since I'm planning to add more cameras, I'm concerned about my overhead and I'm wondering if adding an encoder would help.

I also noticed in this comment on this thread:

High CPU Usage/High Encoding/Taking too long to encode? Read this first!

Encoding video is a very CPU-intensive operation, and OBS is no exception. OBS uses the best open source video encoding library available, x264, to encode video, and can use hardware encoders like NVENC on high end GPUs. However, some people might experience high CPU utilization, and other...

obsproject.com

"OBS is different from many other streaming/recording programs in that it makes use of your GPU for better performance. "

I have a few spare GPU's, an AMD Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB and an AMD Radeon R9 290 4gb. My son also has a couple of Nvidia Tesla K20X 66gb cards that he's not using right now, (He's a dev and always has shiny hardware laying around).

I also noticed some USB encoders in a couple of threads, the Lightcolor Audio Video Capture USB:

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B088H7CX31/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

and a link to these USB devices:

Amazon.ca

So, any thoughts, suggestions or philosophical musings?

Thanks!

zog

 

[koala]

Don't use such obsolete hardware. You burn more money per year with the power they consume than two Raspberry Pi would cost, which are probably more powerful than your obsolete hardware. The only drawback with this comparison is that you're not able to run OBS on a Raspberry Pi.
Trying to make things work on such obsolete hardware is pure waste of time. You're getting video with a quality that was state of the art about 10 years ago. Are you really satisfied with that?

 

[zogthegreat]

Don't use such obsolete hardware. You burn more money per year with the power they consume than two Raspberry Pi would cost, which are probably more powerful than your obsolete hardware. The only drawback with this comparison is that you're not able to run OBS on a Raspberry Pi.

Respectfully, then why bring up the Raspberry Pi? I need hardware that OBS will work on. Yes, a Xeon X3450 is old hardware, but it still works on almost any platform.

As far as power draw, the Xeon X3450 draws 95w, which is comparable to my current desktop, an i5-6600k @ 91w. I'm hoping to upgrade to a Ryzen 5 5600X @ 65w, but money is tight right now. Which is one of the reasons that I'm using old hardware that's laying around.

Trying to make things work on such obsolete hardware is pure waste of time. You're getting video with a quality that was state of the art about 10 years ago. Are you really satisfied with that?

Err, so about the video quality. The system is being used to live stream pigeons on my balcony, so I'm really not looking to spend more than the $25 that I spent on the cameras. Once again, this is also why I'm using old hardware that's laying around... it's for watching pigeons, I really don't want to spend any extra money.

 

[koala]

Well, I have to apologize a bit. Usually, if people come up with a Xeon CPU, they grabbed a server case from some corporate wastedump and though they got a powerful machine. And these are really junk. Actually, I have a i5 750 in a closet which I use as vmware esxi server for my virtual machine tinkering, and this is almost exactly the same CPU as your xeon, just the consumer version without the hyperthreading.
I have a Windows 10 vm on this and use it as testing ground for OBS as well to have a different environment than my powerful real PC.

It's possible to run OBS on it, but if you want somewhat fluent fps for encoding, you need a hardware encoder. Newer Intel CPUs have an iGPU and Quicksync onboard, but this CPU not. For nvenc, you need a Nvidia GPU with at least the Kepler chipset (GTX 6xx), which was the first with nvenc. Nvidia seem to have dropped nvenc support according to the latest encode and decode GPU support matrix, but I heard the driver actually still supports it. Your GTX 560 is too old - it doesn't have Nvenc. No way to make nvenc work with that. Get a GTX 660 or 670, or to be on the safe side, some GTX 7xx to have nvenc. (this is where you might start wasting your time by searching for a free newer GPU, or your money by buying a newer but also obsolete one).
For plain CPU encoding, the GPU isn't powerful enough.

You're using rdp, this is the second issue. Rdp installs a virtual GPU that is emulated by the CPU, which consumes half of the available CPU and isn't powerful enough for real graphics. And it is removed by Windows as soon as you disconnect the session, so streaming/recording will stop at that moment. Use some other means to remote control this PC if you intend to use OBS: use vnc or similar software that doesn't use a virtual GPU like rdp but mirror the desktop from the physical GPU instead.