Any news on GPU transcoding, especially Intel Quick Sync?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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So just to help clarify this I have actually used QuickSync on a Dell Venue Pro 8 with MCEBuddy. MCE Buddy uses the Handbrake integration with QuickSync and to put it simply there is no way it can do even 1 1080p transcode. Now that isn't exactly a valid comparison to Celeron j2900 cpu, but is probably not far off from the silvermount CPU's used in some of the NAS's. Either way Simply put even with Quicksync you wouldn't get realtime transcoding of 1080P video. Quicksync is not the same across all CPU's and newer modern Desktop CPU's with quicksync will be much faster then any other variation with it. But that doesn't help low powered solutions. I am also in total agreement with MovieFan on the fact that I don't want to introduce any artifacts when i am watching a move on my 55" TV or at my folks beach house on there 48" TV. Maybe on a portable device it wouldn't be as much of a issue but even then I generally end up playing back content on a bigger screen. So in that scenario the best quality is needed instead of transcoding speed. I do understand the desire here, but i don't think it is as simple as simply enabling Quicksync.
 

There are multiple of reviews of various NAS units with Quick Sync demonstrating they can transcode 1080 video. Here's one: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8192/qnap-tsx51-nas-series-intel-quick-sync-gets-its-killer-app The NAS apps do it just fine. See:  https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS214play  and their FAQ on transcoding: https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/faq/577 and also Qnap's product:  https://www.qnap.com/i/en/product/model.php?II=142

There's ample evidence the hardware is up to the task. It's just a matter of having more and better software options--like Plex. And if Plex doesn't do it, others will. The NAS manufacture's own apps, for example, are getting steadily better and more capable. Plex is going to be left behind if they have no desire to support current hardware technology.

And for the purists worried about artifacts when watching on their biggest screen you can rip or pre-transcode the video into the best native format for that device and let the server only transcode for other devices where ultimate quality is less of an issue. Most of us end up with video in a variety of formats and quality levels. I just want a NAS that doesn't fall on its face when transcoding is required. That's entirely possible if Plex would just adopt the Quick Sync version of ffmpeg.

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OK so the 1 is running a legacy Atom CPU that doesn’t have Quicksync, and the other devices you mentioned are running 2.4Ghz Celeron CPU’s. They don’t list if it is a dual core or quad core so hard to explain performance on it. On Synology’s FAQ site that make it very clear that not all video can be transcoded to 1080p. The Anandtech article also speculates to the use of Quicksync but admits that they can’t confirm it for sure. They also speculate about it’s ability based to a library Intel has contributed considerably for linux use of Quicksync. What I was doing was citing a personal experience with Intel Quicksync, on a Wintel low powered device. Now it is certainly possible that they used a cpu that just has enough CPU for one transcode. From what I can tell the Celeron they are using is either a j1800, J2850 or J2900. And I have found those would be really close even with plex to transcoding a single stream. Notice that comment “Even with Plex”. Actually now that think about it i did do a 720P transcode even from my dell venue 8 Pro. I had Plex loaded on it for a time to test Baytrail-M’s ability to be a PMS server. Keep in mind i am not saying it wouldn’t be great to get a low powered solution. I am just saying it isn’t realistic.


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1 -  It is a little hard to tell the quality from still images when yo have to look 1 at a time.  It would have been nicer if they put the same frame from all the test on 1 page or even small clips so you could them in motion.  I do not agree that QS would only be use for low quality low-speed connections.  If I wanted to utilize QS I would want it as my general transcoder for everything.  That is what FFMPEG does now for PMS.  I guess they could make it an option like they have now for the legacy transcoder.  That will depend on how much work FFMPEG can get done on their end.

Did you read the last part of the article?  They did not praise the quality highly.

[spoiler]In our opinion, the QuickSync results on HD4600 appear to be worse than what is obtained on the HD4000. With Haswell, Intel introduced seven levels of quality/performance settings that application developers can choose from. According to Intel, even the lowest quality Haswell QSV settings should be better than what we had with Ivy Bridge. In practice, this simply isn't the case. There's a widespread regression in image quality ranging from appreciably worse to equal at best with Haswell compared to Ivy Bridge. I'm not sure what's going on here but QuickSync remains one of the biggest missed opportunities for Intel over the past few years. The fact that it has taken this long to get Handbrake support going is a shame. Now that we have it, the fact that Intel seems to have broken image quality is the icing on a really terrible cake.[/spoiler]

2 - Interesting.  Had not seen that before.  Thank you for that info.  So you can scratch that one off the list.  I wonder what FFMPEG's implementation looks like.

3 - QS is not an extension, it is actual separate hardware portion on the CPU so it is not the same comparison.  I do not think QS supports h265.  With that becoming more prevalent in the years, QS could get abandoned for something better, which could happen and make any work with QS wasted.  4 years for hardware based technology is still pretty new.  Think about WiFi, 802.11ac first came out in 2011 and most devices still do not use it and everyone knows what WiFi is.

Since PMS's transcoder is highly based on FFMPEG, once those guys get QS stable, I would not be surprised to see it show up in PMS.

The point of my linking to the article is that the quality issues are relative. They are comparing Haswell's implementation to Ivy Bridge, and they were not pleased that quality regressed somewhat. That said, we're talking artifacts that most people can't even see and need to be examined frame by frame to make clear. This is something like complaining about 320k compressed audio in comparison to FLAC. Yes, there's a difference, but it's very minor to all but the most sensitive eyes. 

I don't know how you use Plex transcoding, but I personally stream everything locally without transcode. The only time I need transcoding is when I'm streaming over a cellular network or over a poor WiFi connection. I assumed that most transcoding is done for lack of bandwidth in a similar fashion. (Why transcode at all if you have the bandwidth?) YMMV.

I understand that QS is extra on-chip DSP and not an extension per se, just using it as shorthand. I don't think that changes the argument - there's no reason to believe Intel will drop it. They may perhaps improve it into QS v2, but the API could be completely unaffected by that as well. Nothing's guaranteed for a startup like Plex - why not put the minimal effort to support something so transformative for anyone with a recent Intel processor when ffmpeg has already done the heavy lifting?

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I don't know how you use Plex transcoding, but I personally stream everything locally without transcode. The only time I need transcoding is when I'm streaming over a cellular network or over a poor WiFi connection. I assumed that most transcoding is done for lack of bandwidth in a similar fashion. (Why transcode at all if you have the bandwidth?) YMMV.

Many many people use containers/codecs that not all of their clients support natively. I suspect that transcoding is more used, in the Plex world at least, to solve that issue than to solve bandwidth issues. I do however not have any data to back that up, only years in the forum. And it is hard to make an educated guess from support threads, I know.

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OK so the 1 is running a legacy Atom CPU that doesn't have Quicksync, and the other devices you mentioned are running 2.4Ghz Celeron CPU's. They don't list if it is a dual core or quad core so hard to explain performance on it. On Synology's FAQ site that make it very clear that not all video can be transcoded to 1080p. The Anandtech article also speculates to the use of Quicksync but admits that they can't confirm it for sure. They also speculate about it's ability based to a library Intel has contributed considerably for linux use of Quicksync. What I was doing was citing a personal experience with Intel Quicksync, on a Wintel low powered device. Now it is certainly possible that they used a cpu that just has enough CPU for one transcode. From what I can tell the Celeron they are using is either a j1800, J2850 or J2900. And I have found those would be really close even with plex to transcoding a single stream. Notice that comment "Even with Plex". Actually now that think about it i did do a 720P transcode even from my dell venue 8 Pro. I had Plex loaded on it for a time to test Baytrail-M's ability to be a PMS server. Keep in mind i am not saying it wouldn't be great to get a low powered solution. I am just saying it isn't realistic.

The Synology is using a version of Quick Sync it just isn't called that in the Evansport chipset as it's a SoC rather than a regular CPU. And the Synology FAQ is a bit hard to read, but if you look at the first column for the "Play" version of their products with Evansport, you see it *will* transcode the vast majority of formats with the right software (i.e. software that can take advantage of the hardware assist).

Intel designed Quick Sync (and Evansport) for things like set top boxes. The hardware is absolutely intended to allow decoding 1080 video in real time with a low power CPU. Hardware decoding is what allows you to watch HD video for 8+ hours on a tablet while running on battery. Why it didn't work on your Dell tablet, I don't know, but it certainly works in many other circumstances. There have been some complaints Intel didn't make the Quick Sync API as friendly as they could have, but that hurdle has already been cleared now that it's incorporated into ffmpeg.

It is true the ultimate performance of Quick Sync is tied to the CPU it's paired with but even early 2014 chips are "good enough" and it just keeps getting better. I'm not suggesting that every device with Quick Sync can transcode every possible video source on-the-fly but neither can every PC without Quick Sync using the current version of Plex. At least having a tick box in Plex to use Quick Sync when possible would be a huge improvement and make Plex viable on a far wider range of hardware and/or video formats. If someone still wants to do it the old school way with a quad core 85 watt TDP i7, that's fine they can. But a 10 watt TDP low power Celeron (like the J-series you suggest) could deliver similar results in the majority of cases if Plex would offer Quick Sync support.

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Many many people use containers/codecs that not all of their clients support natively. I suspect that transcoding is more used, in the Plex world at least, to solve that issue than to solve bandwidth issues. I do however not have any data to back that up, only years in the forum. And it is hard to make an educated guess from support threads, I know.

I agree. I have over 3 terabytes of video dating back many years in a variety of formats and I don't want to offline transcode all of it to the lowest-common-denominator among my multiple devices. And what happens when I buy a new playback device? I'd much prefer to keep the video in its native (and highest quality) format and only transcode it as needed, on the fly, for whatever device is in use.

Right now if you try to use a NAS, or other low powered PC, as a Plex Server you're very likely to encounter playback errors because the server hits 100% CPU utilization trying to transcode in real time. I would imagine it discourages a lot of people from using Plex at all. Quick Sync support would massively improve the odds of low power PC's working smoothly and allow newer Intel-based NAS devices to properly run Plex with far fewer restrictions than today.

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Many many people use containers/codecs that not all of their clients support natively. I suspect that transcoding is more used, in the Plex world at least, to solve that issue than to solve bandwidth issues. I do however not have any data to back that up, only years in the forum. And it is hard to make an educated guess from support threads, I know.

That makes sense. Thanks.

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The Synology is using a version of Quick Sync it just isn't called that in the Evansport chipset as it's a SoC rather than a regular CPU. And the Synology FAQ is a bit hard to read, but if you look at the first column for the "Play" version of their products with Evansport, you see it *will* transcode the vast majority of formats with the right software (i.e. software that can take advantage of the hardware assist).

Intel designed Quick Sync (and Evansport) for things like set top boxes. The hardware is absolutely intended to allow decoding 1080 video in real time with a low power CPU. Hardware decoding is what allows you to watch HD video for 8+ hours on a tablet while running on battery. Why it didn't work on your Dell tablet, I don't know, but it certainly works in many other circumstances. There have been some complaints Intel didn't make the Quick Sync API as friendly as they could have, but that hurdle has already been cleared now that it's incorporated into ffmpeg.

It is true the ultimate performance of Quick Sync is tied to the CPU it's paired with but even early 2014 chips are "good enough" and it just keeps getting better. I'm not suggesting that every device with Quick Sync can transcode every possible video source on-the-fly but neither can every PC without Quick Sync using the current version of Plex. At least having a tick box in Plex to use Quick Sync when possible would be a huge improvement and make Plex viable on a far wider range of hardware and/or video formats. If someone still wants to do it the old school way with a quad core 85 watt TDP i7, that's fine they can. But a 10 watt TDP low power Celeron (like the J-series you suggest) could deliver similar results in the majority of cases if Plex would offer Quick Sync support.


So by what you said Synology is using a dedicated encoder and not Quicksync. Ok i can see that as dedicated hardware encoder should be capeable of whatever it is designed to do.

Decoding and encoding or two very different things. Transcoding is essentially doing both at the same time. I never said the Dell Venue Pro 8 couldn't decode a 1080P video. I said it wasn't going to be able to decode and encode on the fly a 1080p stream. And i said it couldn't do it with Quicksync enabled. I have validated that by using a MCEBuddy to do a conversion which took a few hours to convert a 1 hour video using QuickSync. I also pointed out that the tablet was actually able to transcode a 720P stream. So that device is just on the border of being able to support higher quality.

I am not saying Quicksync wouldn't make a difference. I am just saying that for the performance level you would get with those lower power CPU's you aren't that far off from minimally capable hardware like a J2850 or j2900 CPU which can (by benchmarch) do 1 1080p transcode.

I suspect that Qnap you linked did exactly that. They included a J2850 that has just enough umph to process a single 1080p stream. Most systems with the J2850 or j2900 are low powered systems in the 10-20 watt range like your NAS concept.

Ontop of that your concept is flawed as you need to account for power of disk drives. Typically they use between 4-10 watts each depending on various characteristics. So the power envelope would increase again. My server has 7 drives and a regular i5 2400 and idles around 85watts. Most of that isn't the CPU, but my fans, the Mobile drive racks i have, and the hard drives. Though i would expect a 8 drive nas to do better it wouldn't be by much. Maybe 20 watts. So i pay for an additional 20 watts of power for a much more robust setup.


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So by what you said Synology is using a dedicated encoder and not Quicksync. Ok i can see that as dedicated hardware encoder should be capeable of whatever it is designed to do.

Decoding and encoding or two very different things. Transcoding is essentially doing both at the same time. I never said the Dell Venue Pro 8 couldn't decode a 1080P video. I said it wasn't going to be able to decode and encode on the fly a 1080p stream. And i said it couldn't do it with Quicksync enabled. I have validated that by using a MCEBuddy to do a conversion which took a few hours to convert a 1 hour video using QuickSync. I also pointed out that the tablet was actually able to transcode a 720P stream. So that device is just on the border of being able to support higher quality.

I am not saying Quicksync wouldn't make a difference. I am just saying that for the performance level you would get with those lower power CPU's you aren't that far off from minimally capable hardware like a J2850 or j2900 CPU which can (by benchmarch) do 1 1080p transcode.

I suspect that Qnap you linked did exactly that. They included a J2850 that has just enough umph to process a single 1080p stream. Most systems with the J2850 or j2900 are low powered systems in the 10-20 watt range like your NAS concept.

Ontop of that your concept is flawed as you need to account for power of disk drives. Typically they use between 4-10 watts each depending on various characteristics. So the power envelope would increase again. My server has 7 drives and a regular i5 2400 and idles around 85watts. Most of that isn't the CPU, but my fans, the Mobile drive racks i have, and the hard drives. Though i would expect a 8 drive nas to do better it wouldn't be by much. Maybe 20 watts. So i pay for an additional 20 watts of power for a much more robust setup.
 

The Synology uses an Intel Evansport System On A Chip (SoC) that includes Quick Sync on the chip. So yes it's a dedicated hardware resource but it's all part of the SoC.

Any NAS lets the drives sleep when it's not in use. The drives only draw 0.5 watts, or less, each when they're not spinning. And they wake up on any request to the NAS for file access which is compatible with Plex. So your argument there is false.

Fans are not a big power draw at typically only about 1 watt or less each. But, again, in a typical NAS the single fan can be set up to not run at all, or run at very low speed (and less than 0.5 watts) unless certain temps are exceeded. In my NAS the single fan normally doesn't run at all. Qnap even makes a fanless version of the TS-251 called the HS-251.

My dual drive (two 4GB WD Red drives) NAS literally idles at 10 watts total power from the wall outlet when the drives are spun down. That's not some hypothetical number, that's reality. Adding more drives would add about 0.5 watts per drive of idle power. That's massively more efficient than your i5 at 85 watts. And, if Plex could be bothered to support Quick Sync, my 10 watts idle NAS could play most anything your 85 watt server could. I could run eight of my servers for one of yours which is an excellent example of the up to 8X efficiency increase I mentioned in my first post.

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The only indication I can find that the Intel Evansport uses QuickSync and not some other specialized video encoder/decoder is from you saying it. Saying it doesn't make it so.

The ability to put drives into standby is not specific to NAS devices, computers also do the same thing if configured in power management. One important thing to know is that coming out of standby isn't instantaneous and is actually additional wear on the drive. It isn't good to put hard drives to sleep to often. So with that understanding I wouldn't expect your drives to be in standby all the time if you aren't accessing your NAS. Some of the time sure, but that is consistent for any device.

Fans are a integral part of any cooling system. Especially a electrical system with allot or components in close proximity to each other. You can run your NAS without a fan or cooling, but again I would opt to add a extra fan or two to ensure my drives and other components remain cool. Inadequate cooling simply leads to component failure. It is also a incorrect statement that all fans run 1 watt or less. in fact I checked one of the spare 120mm fans I have here it is is 12v at .2amps. That is 2.4 watts.

You completely missed my point by listing what is in my system. You can't even compare our two solutions because you simply can't match what my system can do in any way. Since you seem to want to focus on the CPU being the only power contributor it is pointless to discuss.

To get back on the topic of the thread about Quicksync support we simply don't see things the same.  I don't know what experience you have with running real quicksync on low end hardware but I do. I have also run GPU assisted applications on my desktops with various video cards. So I have seen the impact of various configurations. I am not saying nor have I said quicksync support would be a bad thing. What I have said though is that enabling quicksync won't create some magic that low end hardware would now be viable server. 

Have you heard the old adage you get what you pay for. It is pretty much like that. You buy a cheap unit with insufficient CPU you are pretty much stuck in that boat until you replace it. It isn't like you can't buy a NAS with the needed cpu to run plex easily. They just aren't cheap.

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For the whole NAS QuickSync discussion. The QNAP TS-x51 is probably a better example. It officially supports QuickSync and has a media transcoder built to use it.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8192/qnap-tsx51-nas-series-intel-quick-sync-gets-its-killer-app/4

Evansport has a dedicated transcoder, but it was never officially labeled as "QuickSync".

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Totally agree. That unit has the j1800 Baytrail-D CPU. That CPU can get close doing a single 1080p stream even without QuickSync.

I just performed a experiment to see how accurate Murphybed was about Drives being insignificant. Basically I unpluged all but my OS drive in my DIY PC Server. The power change was dramatic. Down to 42watts at idle. With that being found I am going to see what I can do about improving power management on my disk drives, but clearly drives are not insignificant. And there ability to sleep would be heavily effect buy use case. 

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Fans are a integral part of any cooling system. Especially a electrical system with allot or components in close proximity to each other. You can run your NAS without a fan or cooling, but again I would opt to add a extra fan or two to ensure my drives and other components remain cool. Inadequate cooling simply leads to component failure. It is also a incorrect statement that all fans run 1 watt or less. in fact I checked one of the spare 120mm fans I have here it is is 12v at .2amps. That is 2.4 watts.

You completely missed my point by listing what is in my system. You can't even compare our two solutions because you simply can't match what my system can do in any way. Since you seem to want to focus on the CPU being the only power contributor it is pointless to discuss.

To get back on the topic of the thread about Quicksync support we simply don't see things the same.  I don't know what experience you have with running real quicksync on low end hardware but I do. I have also run GPU assisted applications on my desktops with various video cards. So I have seen the impact of various configurations. I am not saying nor have I said quicksync support would be a bad thing. What I have said though is that enabling quicksync won't create some magic that low end hardware would now be viable server. 

Have you heard the old adage you get what you pay for. It is pretty much like that. You buy a cheap unit with insufficient CPU you are pretty much stuck in that boat until you replace it. It isn't like you can't buy a NAS with the needed cpu to run plex easily. They just aren't cheap.

To be really clear, I'm trying to compare the average total power of Plex servers during typical use. I'm not just talking about CPU power as you suggest. The total average power draw of a TS-251 is around 11 watts from the wall if you let the drive sleep. The total for your server, averaged out over a typical day if you sleep the drives, might be 50-some watts. That's still a huge difference.

The reason the fan in the TS-251 only needs 1 watt is it has a lot less heat to get rid of. So you can use a single, smaller, lower speed, quieter, fan. Or you can just put a bigger passive heatsink on the CPU and take the fan out completely--like Qnap did with the HS-251. Obviously you can't do that with an 85 watt server--it would quickly cook itself.

The drives are certainly significant when they're actively being used, but for typical use of a media server, they won't be used very often. Unlike a PC running Windows that frequently needs to access at least the OS drive (preventing it from sleeping) the drives in a NAS will stay spun-down until you request a file from them. In practice, that's only going to be a few times a day if it's mainly only being used as your media server, for backups, etc. That's not a wear-and tear issue. In fact, the drives will likely last longer with sleep enabled--much cooler and no moving parts while they're sleeping.

By the time you buy or build a PC as a server, with an SSD for the boot drive, a legal copy of Windows, and the capability for at least 2 more RAID drives, with quality components, you're in the same ballpark or even beyond the price of the TS-251. And it will still use a lot more power and lack many of the TS-251's features (like dual LAN for example).

There's nothing "cheap" about a Qnap NAS except what it saves you in energy costs and space. In general, good NAS hardware is made to run 7/24 for many years while non-server-grade PCs are not. PC motherboards are famous for frying their CPU power supply capacitors for example. The TS-251 can also saturate a gigabit LAN connection--i.e. the gigabit ethernet is the bottleneck for read/write speeds not the CPU or SATA interface. So, purely as a file server, it has plenty of CPU. And if you want 4 drives, get a TS-451. As a server, there's not much you *can't* do on a TS-251 performance wise--except sadly transcode 1080 video with the Plex server app.

I'm not suggesting everyone replace their high powered servers with a small NAS. Some people like to drive their 6000 pound heavy duty 12 MPG truck to work every day even when a much smaller vehicle would be far more efficient. And perhaps they need a big truck for other reasons. That's their choice. It would be nice, however, if Plex would support Quick Sync as there's little downside in adding the option and the cumulative energy savings, and convenience of a self-contained all-in-one NAS solution, would be huge.

As for high-end NAS units the problem there is they draw as much power as a PC and generally are much more expensive as they're intended for enterprise use. So that's not really a good solution for a home media server. Quick Sync is the essential addition that makes hardware like the TS-251 viable for Plex.

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The point of my linking to the article is that the quality issues are relative. They are comparing Haswell's implementation to Ivy Bridge, and they were not pleased that quality regressed somewhat. That said, we're talking artifacts that most people can't even see and need to be examined frame by frame to make clear. This is something like complaining about 320k compressed audio in comparison to FLAC. Yes, there's a difference, but it's very minor to all but the most sensitive eyes.


I've used QuickSync and quality for the "Balanced" profile is actually better than the "Prefer higher speed encoding" on Plex. This was on an i3-2100 Sandy Bridge. I forgot what version of Handbrake Nightly it was exactly. Plex was set to 720p, 3Mbps. Meanwhile, resulting QuickSync encode was just 2.5Mbps. As for speed, I believe it was encoding at ~80 FPS for VC-1 encoded content (software decode, hardware encode) and ~150 FPS for H.264 (full hardware decode and encode).

The quality issue AnandTech saw was likely due to software not being updated yet to support Haswell. I remember seeing a review comparing PSNR of QuickSync encodes on Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell, and at the same profiles, Haswell was consistently better than or comparable to Ivy Bridge. I ran some quick and dirty encodes a while back (maybe a year ago?) and from memory, I found QuickSync Balanced QP 20 to be comparable or better than x264 Fast CRF 20 subjectively.
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3 - QS is not an extension, it is actual separate hardware portion on the CPU so it is not the same comparison.  I do not think QS supports h265.  With that becoming more prevalent in the years, QS could get abandoned for something better, which could happen and make any work with QS wasted.


Not on current processors, no. Skylake is supposed to include full H.265 hardware decode acceleration. I reckon QuickSync H.265 encoding will follow. I believe Broadwell already includes support for partial H.265 hardware decode acceleration.
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This has been a very good topic to follow.

A lot of good points brought up.

I myself am personally for the QuickSync implementation. I think it brings a lot of advantage to the table, especially in a processor-power constrained situation. And as mentioned by others, QuickSync implementation improves with every new Intel release and they have come a long way from the first implementation. It is adopted by QNAS in their Media Server app as well. The fact that ffmpeg has official support for it now also shows that it has probably earned their time to work on it and hence should be a tech that Plex shouldn't hesitate to throw their weight around it, especially with all the advantages in store...

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Here’s a nice review on the subject:
http://missingremote.com/review/intel-quick-sync-examining-haswell-performance


Surprisingly, at QP 16 and CRF 16, Haswell QuickSync was better than x264 CRF 16. Alas, they didn’t really mention resulting bitrates and file sizes, and they didn’t specify the x264 preset/options used but in general, I believe setting CRF would target the same quality regardless of preset. The difference is bitrate and file size for faster profiles would be bigger than slower ones (e.g. you might need 4Mbps with Fast preset to get the same quality as 3Mbps in Slow).


Plex Pass Members can vote for the feature request here:
https://forums.plex.tv/topic/50514-intel-quick-sync-video/

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Many many people use containers/codecs that not all of their clients support natively. I suspect that transcoding is more used, in the Plex world at least, to solve that issue than to solve bandwidth issues. I do however not have any data to back that up, only years in the forum. And it is hard to make an educated guess from support threads, I know.

An unintended consequence of not implementing new technologies like this, that look great on paper, is that you will lose users over it. No self respecting admin like myself can piss away CPU cycles for no reason. I just don't have it in me.

If Media Browser implements Intel QS reliably, and Plex makes no indication it is going that way, I will have to eventually switch no matter how much ■■■■ my significant other will give me because she needs to learn a new app to watch her TV shows.

The huge increases that CPU bound devices are showing, will encourage users who do not have any CPU issues to switch, just based on those increases, whether it is reality or not.

I understand it is a small team, I am also a programmer/sys admin so I understand that resources are an issue however, not to sound harsh but as a consumer of your products, that's not my problem.

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An unintended consequence of not implementing new technologies like this, that look great on paper, is that you will lose users over it. ...

.. or not gain new ones..

I own a NAS with J1800 CPu and have problems watching 1080p videos using Plex. I belive with QS support Plex would easly handle them.

As those CPU (J1800, J1900) are going to be more and more popular for NAS I belive there will be many more potential Plex users longing for that feature.

BTW. I dont really care if there is a slight decrease in video quality when using QS to transcode.

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FFmpeg 2.6 now supports Nvidia's NVENC

http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=blob;f=RELEASE_NOTES;hb=release/2.6