As the title says, the plex transcoder will not play 4k video anymore (used to fine). Now it says, “Conversion failed. The transcoder exited due to an error.” every time I try to play a 4k video.
Second and equally as disturbing, Plex is only using one of the 2 physical CPUs in my system. (On my old server it used both just fine)
This server is running 2 E5-2670 v2 CPUs and has 128GB of ram all to its self. This system is meant for Plex and Plex only. Has a fresh install of windows server 2012 R2. I have been at this for a few hours now and I have to get to bed.
The error of note I found in the logs are:
[Transcoder] Error initializing output stream 0:0 – Error while opening encoder for output stream #0:0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height
DEBUG - MDE: Cannot direct stream video stream due to profile or setting limitations
But included are the logs themselves. If anyone can help me with this that would be great. I have been using Plex with almost no issues for years and it has been great. I held off on 4k content for a while waiting for the tech to mature a little. I would like to be able to use it. I know this server is MORE than powerful enough to run it. Should be able to handle 2 or 3 4k streams at once. Thank you in advance for anyone willing to help.
Edit - When trying to post this it locked up… looks like i have 3 posts - I am sorry about that
Waking up this morning, I still have no idea what’s wrong with this new server. Do you think deleting the whole server and starting it over from scratch would work? I REALLY don’t want to do that since that’s over 1100 Movies and 200 TV Shows… But I really want the server working properly.
Not sure that I can provide any real help, just some observations based on my own experience.
Windows PMS is a 32-bit app so the most memory it will use is 4 GB. You way overspent on RAM for a PMS-only Windows server. I also don’t see what benefit using Windows Server 2012 brought to the equation either except more cost. It certainly complicates (prevents?) using a GPU for hardware-assisted 4K transcoding.
For a time, I ran PMS on a dual 8-core Xeon processor Dell T5600 workstation only slightly slower than yours and was only able to transcode one 4K H265 video - barely. If you get even two concurrent such transcodes in software only, I’d be surprised. A curious thing I noted when running under Windows 7 was that PMS would only transcode on the actual cores, not the hyper-thread CPUs. Maybe that’s the explanation for what you see as PMS using only one processor.
Assuming your non-4K media all plays satisfactorily (do they?) then I’d consider just setting up a separate library just for 4K/HEVC and only play it from clients that don’t require transcoding.
I am not sure how to respond to this since the one question you asked was answered in my comment (and the provided logs) of 4k is not working. As far as the rest of your comments, none of it hurts, and I didn’t pay extra for any of it so it does not matter. More of anything will not hurt it.
Just want the server to use all cores and threads like my previous one did before, and transcode well, again like the previous one.
I am going to remove PMS tomorrow and let it rebuild from scratch… this will take a few days I am sure. This is the only thing I can think of as to a reason why it would not work. Perhaps some file copied from the previous server (even though I used their guide) is just not compatible with this one or didn’t like the fact I changed the drive layouts. Not sure, however, I will post if there was a change. So I guess I will see you all in a few days once it has repopulated everything.
Did you ever find a fix? i have a dual xeon server as well with two e5-2450 v2’s, and experience the same behavior (server doesn’t even try to transcode 4k just errors out). I am also on server 2012 r2.
Yes, and no. The answer will not satisfy you I am sure. What I found out is the Web player of plex can not handle 4k content. It DID however play on my 4k chrome-cast. I never found an answer as to why it only uses one physical CPU though. If you find anything about the feel free to contact me.
i wish. i gave up on 4k content and just went back to 1080p variants. I just couldn’t get it working reliably. Also it seems that even with 1080p content plex will still only use one cpu at a time.
