Biggest Upgrades for the Buck (2023)?

[bdub76]

I moved to WIFI 6 because I’m cycling out my old laptops to new ones that support it. However, when I look at my WIFI usage, it’s mostly my ROKU, which is still on WIFI 4. It’s a Premier+.

What’s the biggest upgrade I can make to my home tech now? It seems like what I really need is a ROKU device that supports AV1. From what I have been reading, AV1 support is going to be a much bigger deal than WIFI 7. It should reduce my bandwidth used, which should make everything better. Streaming services like YouTube and Netflix are already deploying it. New GPUs have hardware to decode it.

I think the biggest bang for my buck will be upgrading to a ROKU that supports AV1. And it looks like their SOC Realtek chipset can handle it. Maybe I wait for their refresh this year.

What do you guys think? Am I missing a better innovation right now?

 

[RMerlin]

It depends on your specific needs. Do you store a lot of data? Then a NAS might be the best place to upgrade. Do you move a lot of data? Then moving to 2.5 Gbps Ethernet might be the best improvement. You do a lot of streaming? Then an nVidia Shield might possibly be a better solution than Roku.

Ultimately we can't really say what would be a significant upgrade for you specifically.

AV1 has a lot of traction behind it because it's open source, unlike H.264/H.265/MPEG which were tied to licences. It may take some time however before the hardware gets there, as AV1 itself is quite computational intensive. How it will be used by streaming services is what will determine whether it's worth it or not. If they just use it to transmit the same image quality at a lower bitrate, then most end users will get no real benefit, while these streaming services will cut down on their bandwidth costs. However if they increase image quality while retaining the same bitrate, only then will end users benefit from it.

 

[bdub76]

It depends on your specific needs. Do you store a lot of data? Then a NAS might be the best place to upgrade. Do you move a lot of data? Then moving to 2.5 Gbps Ethernet might be the best improvement. You do a lot of streaming? Then an nVidia Shield might possibly be a better solution than Roku.

Ultimately we can't really say what would be a significant upgrade for you specifically.

AV1 has a lot of traction behind it because it's open source, unlike H.264/H.265/MPEG which were tied to licences. It may take some time however before the hardware gets there, as AV1 itself is quite computational intensive. How it will be used by streaming services is what will determine whether it's worth it or not. If they just use it to transmit the same image quality at a lower bitrate, then most end users will get no real benefit, while these streaming services will cut down on their bandwidth costs. However if they increase image quality while retaining the same bitrate, only then will end users benefit from it.

Most of the storage on my NAS is media that I ripped from DVDs or Blu Rays. Utilizing AV1 will shrink the space requirements significantly, which will lower my bandwidth requirements. The files will be smaller to send over the network. I can use VMAF to get similar quality

Moving to 2.5Gb/s will have less impact since I can only read and write so fast to HD media. At some point, we might see NAS with M2 NVME SSDs, which are much faster. But I don’t see the investment worthwhile yet. Still too early for home use. And if upload speeds improve in the future, cloud back up will make more sense. But you’ll need more bandwidth to completely replace a NAS to serve media.

I checked my Internet usage over the last couple of months. I stream roughly 300GB of content each month. If I can cut that by even 20-30%, then I’d have a lot less traffic on my network. It’s roughly half of my Internet usage. I use about 600GB a month

I checked and NV Shield Pro isn’t AV1 ready. Maybe they’ll announce an upgrade at CES.

It’s odd to me that streaming devices lag WIFI, but then the requirements are low. I think Netflix said you need only 25Mb/s to stream 4K. I have no problems with 4K HDR with Atmos over WIFI 4.

 

[RMerlin]

which will lower my bandwidth requirements.

Moving to 2.5Gb/s will have less impact since I can only read and write so fast to HD media.

These two contradicts one another. Both cases would result in faster transfers. Are you prepared to re-rip all your DVDs in AV1?

Handbrake just added AV1 support BTW, tho it doesn't leverage hardware encoding yet. Which you shouldn't use anyway for long-term storage, as it has a significant impact on image quality versus pure software encoding.

 

[RMerlin]

I checked and NV Shield Pro isn’t AV1 ready. Maybe they’ll announce an upgrade at CES.

Almost nothing is right now beside Intel Arc (I think it's still awaiting a driver update to unlock it) or Nvidia's 4000 series. I don't expect AV1 to take off until late in 2023 personally. Which would open the way for maybe a Shield TV refresh in 2024, as nVidia is on a 2-3 years cycle so far with refreshes.

 

[bdub76]

These two contradicts one another. Both cases would result in faster transfers. Are you prepared to re-rip all your DVDs in AV1?

Handbrake just added AV1 support BTW, tho it doesn't leverage hardware encoding yet. Which you shouldn't use anyway for long-term storage, as it has a significant impact on image quality versus pure software encoding.

Ideally, I’d use Xmedia Recode and convert my existing files in a batch. But it’s much too slow to be practical right now with svt-AV1. And I’d need to find the settings for equivalent VMAF, which is going to be painful. And because it’s painfully slow, I don’t need fast network writes to my NAS.

I think, what I will do is rip season 1 of Moonlighting, upscale it with Topez AI to 1080p, and then experiment with a season to get my bearings. My current rip is only at 480 with x264. By time I figure this out the hardware should improve.

It looks like hardware is available to decode it today. But the hardware to encode is limited. And there have been issues with the drivers for the arc cards. The NV 40 cards look ridiculously expensive.

 

[L&LD]

HandBrake video transcoder adds official AV1 codec support in latest release | Ars Technica

 

[bdub76]

HandBrake video transcoder adds official AV1 codec support in latest release | Ars Technica

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PgcDemux demuxes a DVD/VOB,IFO (PGC) in its elementary streams, video(m2v), audio(ac3,wav,dts,mpa) and subtitles(sup).

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