The Kiwi Farms Media Processing Server

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kiwifarms.net
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A patron going by as "K" has donated $6000 on the condition that it be put towards hardware. His original idea was to buy a NVIDIA RTX 6000 ADA, which is roughly $6000 online, but such a device would not fit in our existing servers nor do we have a PSU that can support it.

My ultimate plan for the forum is a first step towards the XenForo software rewrite. I want to write a media processor that converts user uploads into playlists. Modern platforms like YouTube do not deliver .mp4 files or byte ranges of .mp4 files for various reasons, what they do is use playlists and a JavaScript player to send 2s chunks of videos. They also often include multiple formats at different resolutions. (To be clear, I do not want to get rid of downloading source files, but anyone who uses the forum knows how bad trying to scan through long videos is.)

After deliberating on what formats to use, I am tempted to go to 1080p in AV1 + 720/480/360p in MPEG. This means excluding a lot of cards which do not support that AV1 codec released in 2019.

I have a usual ensemble of people I trust on hardware decisions. I've gotten a diversity of input. I'm not sure what to do.

Guy 1. He suggests getting an Intel GPU, probably an Intel Arc.
Guy 2. Suggests a GPU server with an NVIDIA Tesla.
Guy 3. Suggests just using an Intel CPU because they have QuickSync and are very good at conversions and support AV1. Suggested an Intel Arc to support it.
Some other guy suggested a Xilinx U30 but those don't support AV1. With Av1 as a requirement he suggested an Intel Arc.
Claude also suggested Arcs on an AM5 board.

One of my pet memes has been a media processing card like from NETINT but I cannot find those surplus. I'm not sure if I want to actually hassle the company to get two of them. They run like $1500 each but can parallel process 32 1080p videos each.

There's also the thought that I could put it towards something that also supports AI for my security tools I asked about before. The original $6000 card he wanted to get could do this, but oddly despite AI originally being ran on GPUs, media processing and tensor cores are at odds with each other these days. I don't think it's possible to build a server that does both media and AI without just getting big boy NVIDIAs, spending a ton of money, and plugging it into a 250W outlet.
 
I'm a big fan of using intel for media and because of their cost efficiency ratio, the arc cards are really damn cheap and got good performance (and i've heard intel has made great strides in power management so the wattage is respectable too)
 
Saar do the needful and hand me NVIDIA graphics card saar.
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My impression from the current state of things is that the upside of AV1's superior compression ratio is only worth the much slower encoding speeds if you're hosting videos that get many views, and that for large and/or low-view-count videos you're better eating the higher storage space with x264/5 than the processing time of encoding in AV1. This could be slightly outdated with newer versions of encoders though.
 
Intel Arc Pro A40 cards as a cluster, get 3 for under 800 bucks.
You don't need any more to do what you want, keep the rest for future proofing so if you have to shell out thousands with no notice you aren't using personal funds.
 
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i'd probably look for netint cards a bit harder if they're as strong as you say they are, where have you been looking for them at?
ok so they only sell them through their website and not to some random chump on ebay, you worried they'll turn you down or is it the price that's the problem?
 
Arcs are nice, I use some at work. Only in a couple workstations though, not as a media server
 
Mark Goldbridge said:
Intel Arc Pro A40 cards as a cluster, get 3 for under 800 bucks.
You don't need any more to do what you want, keep the rest for future proofing so if you have to shell out thousands with no notice you aren't using personal funds.
Click to expand...

Checking the specs of the Arc Pro A40 and it's output, power consumption and price combine to make outstanding value for the money.

I second this suggestion wholeheartedly though if you have to use the funds now there is always need for more RAM and more storage, and now you will have plenty of money left over for both.
 
The Un-Clit said:
Checking the specs of the Arc Pro A40 and it's output, power consumption and price combine to make outstanding value for the money.

I second this suggestion wholeheartedly though if you have to use the funds now there is always need for more RAM and more storage, and now you will have plenty of money left over for both.
Click to expand...
Yeah people sleep on intel but they're really kickass for the prices they aim for.
 
The Intel Arc Pro B60 is purchaseable via retail now and has 24 GB of VRAM. I've seen it from 650 to 800 dollars online and it is also usable in multi GPU setups. Its not the fastest for AI, but from what I can tell, backend tooling is improving and it should be able to handle multiple concurrent local AI processes.

It also does very well with media and the power draw is reasonable from what I know.
 
I actually cannot find any GPU servers anymore that aren't $250,000 H200A monsters like wtf. I just want two cards. Am I going to have to build this myself?
 
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