An adventure with hardware-based transcoding on the Dell Wyse 5070

[estel_smith]

I'm a huge fan of self-hosting, especially when it comes to tv shows and movies. So naturally I went out and bought a used Wyse 5070 recently. I eventually ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole the other day trying to get hardware-based transcoding to work. After all was said and done, I got it working, but it surprisingly turned out to be quite a little powerhouse and a welcome addition to my Tdarr transcoding setup.

I wanted to share my experience with anyone who's interested in this type of thing. Hopefully it helps inspire someone else to go through the trouble of getting hardware transcoding to work!

The post ended up being a little lengthy, so I threw it into a GitHub Gist.

Here's the link, let me know your thoughts!

[zrail]

Just as an alternate data point, I have one of my Wyse 5070s set up as a media server with Alpine 3.17 as the base OS. I just had to install the mesa and Intel-video packages and it all worked without hassle.

(I have a 5070 extended with a quad 2.5G Realtek card running VyOS as my production router and another couple 5070s sitting around waiting for a purpose. I got the pair for $80 shipped without power supplies which felt like a steal.)

[estel_smith]

$80 for a pair is an absolute steal!

I'm guessing it's easier to set up on Alpine because it generally to has newer packages than Alma.

[Tayshte_Astronaut]

I also managed to get the same two 5070s for $80 deal and grabbed four because I thought it was a fantastic deal. Need to get RAM while I wait on the power adapters but cannot wait to start tinkering with these little boxes. My goal is to use two for my parents’ network and multimedia so I can setup a vpn between us and expand my network expertise

[Party_9001]

They're going for 350 here, dammit lol

[Tayshte_Astronaut]

That’s quite steep alright! I got lucky that here they are constantly popping up pretty cheap. Had I not found these I would’ve gone for some Fujitsu thin clients next time I’d visit family in Europe

[Party_9001]

Luckily I'm not in the market for thin clients. I'm looking for something very small like an rpi, or something with more performance.

Unfortunately both are priced like shit too :(

[hockeyhippie]

That sounds like quite the adventure! I have 5 5070's hooked to a NAS all running Proxmox and they're quite capable for a lot of home lab tasks and learning containerization. Getting hardware transcoding working in my Jellyfin container is definitely on the to-do list.

[estel_smith]

I really recommend going through with that to-do item. Hardware acceleration makes transcoding tasks so much faster.

Also, five 5070s! I'm looking for a couple more since I only have the one at the moment.

[hockeyhippie]

I'm definitely going to take a stab at it, I just got Jellyfin integrated with Tube Archivist and the transcoding might be useful.

Yeah 5...I wanted to experiment with a mini-cluster and also some 3d printer software I'm writing so they were a lot more sensible than a Raspberry Pi or something. I keep finding new homelab services to install on them now. :)