Another Hardware Encoder Issue

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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I have the following system:

i7-3770
nVidia GTX 1070

I have disabled the intel video in the Bios, so i’m running the nVidia card only, no matter what I do, all Plex will do is use the GTX for decoding, so its around 5 to 10% use, then it hogs all the CPU for encoding.

I cant seem to figure out why it cant use the the nVidia card for encoding, I dont want Plex to use the CPU at all, I wish they would give us some control over the transcoder system, I would prefer the CPU be left for everything else I’m running.

I have tested this by forcing multiple players into playing the video at a lower resolution, and at a higher bit rate than the original, but every time it uses hardware to decode, and software to encode.

Is there any other way to monitor whats going on apart from the activity section in the web app?

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If you disable it in the BIOS, then the Quicksync hardware in your cpu is also not usable for any other software.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/

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I get that you want the 1070 to do the heavy lifting. Which OS and what Player? If you are doing this with browsers then yes this will happen.

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@OttoKerner: The IGPU is old, and not that good, and I think that the nVidia 1070 should be more than adequate, if not then I will swap it for an AMD card as I have a few R9 280x’s kicking about, I have already read that page, multiple times, if I hand a 6/7/8/9 gen intel CPU, then I would use the iGPU but I have an old gen 3 chip, so not really a good option. Note: I have disabled the iGPU so I could test the dGPU, as I want to see if it was going to work, I need the CPU power reserved for other tasks as this is my home server and it runs my entire smart house.

@pl_5309: The OS in Windows 7 Pro x64, player was nVidia Shield, iPhone X and the web player on an iMac, all yielded the same result, all I could get was Hardware decode and software encode, my opinion is it should be the other way around at least, I have been using nVidia cards to encode H264 and now H265 for quite a while and a 1070 and 1080 will encode 1080p in H264 at around 200 to 300 fps and H265 at more than 100fps, with all this horsepower why would one want to touch the CPU? (Quality with nvenc is perfectly acceptable for me)

It would be nice if Plex had some simple tools, to maybe run a test on its available options and give you some feedback, like a hardware qualification test, at least one could then know what is going on, I basically don’t want Plex using my CPU power for anything but standard tasks and audio transcoding/muxing ect, If I need a different piece of hardware, then I will get it, but honestly a 1070 is powerful card, this should be perfectly fine serving 1 to 2 streams @ 1080p.

Edit: I just tested Emby server and It will use the GPU for both decode and encode, has lots of options, I could easily get up to 35% GPU usage with minimal CPU usage, so one can see it works and works really well, was easy to disable and switch back to CPU and you can see it hog the CPU, only issue was I had to replace FFMPEG with most current release as it refused t use the GPU at first, what does Plex use? does it use FFMPEG as well?

Edit 2: Okay, now after getting emby working, Plex must have gotten jealous, as it is now en/de in hardware??? all my tests yesterday yielded decode only?? now its working as expected.

On a side note, Plex uses less CPU and GPU overall for its transcoding period, emby is a hogg!

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Plex bundles it’s own FFMPEG but will ignore it if you a version installed. Didn’t even consider that, well it looks like you are good for 2 streams of 264/265 GPU. Since you are using Windows you could use the AMD rx280’s for more streams but those things are power hogs.

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I did look in the Plex install folder for FFMPEG, but I only found profiles.

99% of the time only one stream will be used, and on rare occasions 2 or 3 streams at one time, I can accept the CPU usage on these rare occasions, but for daily use I want to make sure the CPU is bound to other tasks.

The AMD card is a power hog, I did have it installed previously, I have the dual BIOS on one of them set to a power save mode of around 120watt, but it would still draw more than a 1070 and I don’t think they will touch H265, only H264, I have switched to H265 for all of my newer media and for archival/file size and I have another machine compressing things to H265 with 1080TI, the quality is still acceptable as it squashes 10 to 15gb blue ray rips down to around 4gb with DTS audio, and I cant tell the difference, but my storage arrays can :slight_smile:

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