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Vultr for video encoding?
Currently in need of a kvm vps for video encoding.
need to be able to install windows 7, 8.1 or 10 (my own iso).
looked at vultr (hourly billing very nice) but wasn't sure if i can "abuse" the cpu for x264/5 and vapoursynth. are they really dedicated or is it likely to get my droplet shut down for too much use?
or are there any better alternatives?
Comments
They have dedicated
serversresources for you to abuse.https://www.vultr.com/pricing/dedicatedcloud/
Check the dedicated cloud instances. Those CPU's are "dedicated"
Crazy expensive though. You could try an OVH HG-7 for around half the price, or a Scaleway with 8 slow (Atom) cores for around 4 cents an hour. I srsly think anyone deeply into this stuff ought to have a personal knockaround dedi just for stuff like this though. I bought a Hetzner i7 mostly as a storage server, but use it all the time for random big computational tasks.
Great suggestion, I nominate dedicate server on online.net
The OP might want to use the server for a few minutes or hour, thats why I suggested vultr dedicated.
I haven't tried Vultr but I know Scaleway charges by the hour, i.e. even if you use only 5 minutes, you still get charged for a full hour. OVH on the other hand reportedly charges by the minute, even though they advertise hourly prices. So it could be worth trying Vultr just to check that.
If OP has a lot of files to convert then Scaleway's Xeon instances might be an ok choice because of the parallel cores, though the Atoms might end up cheaper per file, even though they are slower.
Vultr is the hour. Based on their page.
That's what OVH says too. I'd assume it's by the hour for planning purposes, but also make a point of checking by experiment whether it's really something different.
I think you'll be fine burning cores at Vultr.
Don't forget to make use of this https://mobile.twitter.com/vultr/status/740564552614453248
Using all your cores full-time is fine at Vultr. This has been confirmed by their employees.
thanks for all the replies. going to spin up a vultr instance now.
What they do is slowly change the weight of your cores so everyone else gets priority over you, eventually they will open a ticket telling you that your being limited if it continues.
But I have to ask, why bother is CPU encoding, just get an elcheapo server anywhere and ship a $30 GFX card, install VSDC and have it done in minutes instead of hours.
Unless you goal is to just get it as cheap as humanly possible and you don't care about the time it takes, still I would think even a $10 multi core uncontested dedi would be faster.
can you recommend any cheap server providers (budget 20 euro) who offer a lot of cpu (4/8gb ram ok, ~100gb hdd, maybe 2-3TB traffic) and let me install my own windows isos?
https://www.worldstream.nl/custom_dedicated_servers
https://www.wholesaleinternet.net/dedicated/
https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml
there is another one who's name escapes me, USA based, mostly red website, someone will remember, I have a bad head atm.
@Virmach
Use LEB35 coupon and you get a quite powerful dedi for about 30 euro. Or you can get something similar at Hetzner with a lot more disk space for around the same. A dedi like this is a huge jump over a slower dedi or a VPS of any sort, so I think it is worth the higher budget.
Joe's DC?
@OP: I recommend Hetzner. I got the i7 for a month to run encodes. Smooth af.
Joe's seems to have gotten rid of their listings for very low priced servers, which were always out of stock anyway:
for now i went with oneproviders (online.net) 15 eur server. gives me about 80% of the cpu power of the vultr 40$ instance. ok for now. hoping for another online.net sale with 6,99 atoms.
Encoding performance. GPU is no match to those software solutions.
I am not sure I understand, are you saying CPU is faster than GPU for video encoding?
I use VSDC (paid version) the difference between CPU encoding (i5) and GPU encoding (GTX960) for 5 minutes of full HD 60fps is the difference of 45 - 60 minutes and 5 - 6 minutes, GPU being faster.
This is interesting. I suspect they're using the nvidia nvenc toolkit which is downloadable from nvidia's site and can be compiled into ffmpeg. So I think there are some opportunities here for someone to sell vps on machines with those gpu's. @Ikoula has a dedicated server with gtx1070 at 120 euro/month which might be of interest to heavy transcoding users.
Indeed, but the reality is even an old Nvidia 460 (What I used to use on my older i3 system) would have adequate support, costs about $20 second hand or $35 new and will still do the same video on 8 - 10 minutes vs the hour on the CPU, it was during the old config I bought the full license to unlock the GPU encoding.
It would be a niche market to get in to, I suspect you would need to do some expert level marketing to make it anything but a sideline though.
PovRayBoobz.party - let's make it happen!
Interesting. The nvenc documentation is definitely incomplete about what cards it supports. Do you have a machine like that online that I could run some tests on? Would just need a usermode Linux shell for a few hours, to download ffmpeg and the nvidia toolkit and try to build it and time some conversions.
I know a guy who is doing a monstrous amount of cpu transcoding, like 100's of cores 24/7/365. Maybe I'll bring this up with him.
I had the domain midgetsex.party before. It made a cool IRC vhost for a while.
Remember when you'd have to have an O: line to do that sort of shit? What strange times we live in.
Well, I remember starting using BNCs in the late '90s. I was the cool guy I think. Now nobody gives a shit about it.
lawl
/mode #let +vm FredQc
I don't sorry, these are just personal rigs.
If he wants to give me a sample though I am happy to do a timed run.
I can give you a sample, but the idea is to do the test with ffmpeg/nvenc, whose speed might or might not be similar to vsdc. Are you up for that?