Server Version#: 1.18.4.2171
Intel Q6600K Skylake
Windows 10
I’ve wanted to use Hardware Acceleration for a long time, but its never been reliable enough to use, and at this point it seems Plex has lost interest in working on it. I can’t find any response from them on this forum that indicate they’ve added the issue to their job list.
My two major issues, among the small issues that seem to exist is this
Quality is absolutely terrible on certain media, I believe this is related to the addition of zerocopy. Basically it will turn a nice 4mbit transcode into something worse then a 144p Youtube video, basically giant pixels on the screen where you can’t tell whats going on.
Compatibility with players seems poor, I have random devices like PS4’s that get black screens and other issues on certain types of media. Surely if a specific device/player can’t play a HW transcoded video, it should just ask for a SW encoded video?
Fair enough if HW encoding is as good as its going to get, but why not disable it for Intel and only allow Nvidia? Or allow customisation, for example turning off zerocopy or only HW encoding media files that encode well, or only HW encoding users that have players that can handle it.
In case people don’t know how bad it is, here is a with and without HW transcoding screenshot. Both are 4mbit transcodes.
for best results, you need a 7000 series cpu, with a 600 series intel gpu. Older generations are definitely poorer quality.
if it works too poorly for you, as you probably already know, you can disable hardware transcoding @ Plex Web > settings > transcoder > uncheck use hardware acceleration.
and just because your particular cpu/gpu may look crappy, doesn’t mean other versions do.
as to why it is enabled by default, well that is something new, and I guess they figured it is better to try to use HW and take the load off cpu where possible for the most people.
I am not saying that things may or may not be able to be improved for older generation hardware, but it works pretty well on newer.
I must be missing something, I have a QNAP TS-453Be using the J3455 celeron and if I recall it has a 500 series video encoder and to be honest it does an amazing job HW encoding 1080p. 4k though is a whole different game
I have had 10 streams running with 3 transcoding 1080p, 2 transcoding to ipads and the others all direct play. the 3 transcoding streams were also audio transcoding from ac3 to acc. checked with all those watching and everything looked great with no lag or stuttering.
I was doing a stress test about 5 months after I got my NAS and those were the results on comcast 1 gig network, the 3 streams were all outgoing everything else was on my local network.
My cpu is intel and does very well hw encoding. Your cpu is a much better one and I would have thought should do much better transcoding. Was just trying to give a comparison in the hope you may just need to tweak the software showing it may not be a hardware issue.
You are not alone in experiencing this issue with QSV. It’s complete and total garbage!!!
Just like you, people here in these forums have argued with me saying that I didn’t know what I was talking about. But one day not long ago, one user that had been arguing with me actually went I tried watching a movie from his server through QSV. He came back and I quote “yeah… it is terrible! I wonder why none of my remote users have said anything?”
I don’t think 99% of these people have actually tried watching video through the Intel QSV transcoder.
While Nvidia is much better quality, it suffers from the same compatibility issues. I’ve had to disable my Quadro P5000 because a few of the clients out there (Samsung and TiVo to name a couple) simply aren’t good with the video from my Quadro. Software transcoding is not a problem!
Thanks for the support, I wish people wouldn’t try to sweep it under the rug.
Thats not the case in these scenarios. Nice attempt at a theory though.
If anything, using a bluray remux is simply hiding the problem since you might not be able to notice the huge bitrate starvation of HW acceleration due to Intel zerocopy.
Since the issue only came when zerocopy was added, its kinda obvious, I would have thought.
I don’t re-encode any of my library except for DVD. All Blu-Ray titles are stored in their original form direct from the disc. Live TV is native MPEG2 and QSV really doesn’t like that!
Nvidia, again, doesn’t have an issue with quality. It’s night and day difference!
I’ve tested a few. The newest being a 6th gen i3-6100U. I tried watching a football game on Live TV remote on my tablet and it was impossible to tell what I was looking at! Just a bunch of blurry blocks of colors. Luckily that CPU has enough power to support a couple of software streams so I just turned off QSV.
There’s something DEFINATELY wrong with the later versions 1.18.XXXX versions of Plex Media Server with handing h/w transcodes with Intel CPUs.
I initially had downgraded back to a 1.16 version of the server and since then had zero issues w/ H/W transcoding using my i5-7600k. I only just updated to Version 1.18.4.2171 because I’m reading that the TVDB media scraping with older versions of PMS will stop working as of 1/31/2020.
Yet here I am trying to watch anime with subtitles using ‘automatic’ and the transcoding looks like ASS, unless I force the subtitle burning to “only image formats”. This works to some degree, but the positioning of the subtitle text isn’t displaying where it’s supposed to on the screen… So effectively right now, I have to avoid watching content that requires transcoding. I thought the issues with Intel transcoding were fixed? Clearly not…
Trying to transcode media with Version 1.18.4.2171 is pegging my CPU at 100%
