Live video transcoding servers

The NVIDIA driver allows twelve concurrent NVENC encode sessions per system on the GeForce cards we fit, per NVIDIA’s own support matrix since the R590 branch of November 2025; it was eight for most of 2024 and 2025, and the driver is yours to pin. Count in the unit you already use: channels times profiles. A channel transcoded to three profiles (1080p, 720p, 504p) is three sessions, so one server carries four such channels, or twelve single-profile streams; twenty channels at two profiles is forty sessions, four machines. Streams you pass through untouched cost no encoder session at all, and decode runs on the card’s separate NVDEC engine.

Any card in the catalogue with an NVENC encoder. The working standard here is the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti in the Business Dedicated Server platform (order code D103): Pascal’s sixth-generation encoder does H.264 and HEVC to 10-bit, and its NVDEC decodes H.264, HEVC, VP9 and MPEG-2 sources. Newer encoder generations make a slightly better picture per bit; Pascal’s answer is a notch more bitrate on the profile, which an unmetered port makes free. It cannot encode AV1: that needs Ada or newer, which in the catalogue means the RTX 4090D, the RTX 50 series and the L40S with its three encoders. The A100 and H100 carry no encoder at all, so they are the wrong shelf for video out. Every card and what it adds per month is on the GPU catalogue page.

Yes, out of the box. Flussonic’s hardware transcoder switches to the card with hw=nvenc in the stream config; we hand the machine over with the NVIDIA driver and the flussonic-transcoder package installed on request, verified with nvidia-smi before you get the keys. Wowza Streaming Engine accelerates encode and decode on NVIDIA per its published server specification. FFmpeg ships h264_nvenc and hevc_nvenc, which is also what Xtream-class IPTV panels, Plex and Jellyfin drive underneath.

A machine already racked with the card hands over in minutes; when we fit a card we hold, four to twenty-four hours, with the NVIDIA driver and your engine installed on request and the card verified with nvidia-smi before you get the keys. What is standing ready right now is on the instant page.

No. One physical machine, one tenant, and the card passed straight through to your operating system: no hypervisor, no vGPU profile, no time-slicing. You pin the driver and the CUDA release, and what you measure on day one is what you keep.

Arithmetic. One 1080p profile through x264 cost 3.7 processor cores, measured in 2026 on a production channel on this fleet; the same profile through the card’s encoder cost about a quarter of a core. Three profiles per channel in software is most of a machine, and the card does it with the processor left over for the streaming engine, the panel and the recordings. Wowza’s public transcoder benchmark tells the same story on their pipeline.

A cloud transcoder bills per channel, per hour, and again per gigabyte leaving. A dedicated transcoding server is one flat monthly figure with bandwidth unmetered in both directions, your own licence terms on the engine, and the latency of a machine you placed where your viewers are. The term is one month with no contract, so a two-server event build is a normal order rather than a special case. If you have one channel and want none of the ops, a managed plan is the honest answer, and that is the video streaming page, not this one.

New York, Miami and Bucharest on the standard platform, with San Francisco and Amsterdam available on the larger ones. All five rooms are on our own network with unmetered ports.

One input, several profiles a player can switch between: 1080p, 720p and a mobile tier is the usual shape, and Apple’s HLS authoring specification is the reference for variant sets and the 2-second keyframe cadence. Our default is 1080p, 720p and 504p with aligned keyframes. It is your machine, so the profile set, the bitrates and the presets are yours; if a transcoded stream ever pixelates on motion, the fix is almost always more bitrate or a slower preset on that profile, not a bigger card.