@vincezz said: @Deithmos Emby is really shaping up pretty well. I hope that plex gets a bit more adventurous now that an aspirant appeared.
Perhaps but don’t hold your breath. People have been asking quite loudly for Quick Sync support for nearly two years now and we’ve seen very little from Plex beyond either excuses or “we’re looking into it”.
I have realized that this line is used quite often and years pass but nothing happens. That and “it is on our list”. If people vote with their wallets you will see how fast things happen.
Yes money always speaks. I tried Emby , my first impression wasn’t good. I am personally thinking either a NAS for storage and dedicated Plex Server PC. Or just a NAS, as long as it can play 1080 to at least two devices. But as things stand I don’t think the NAS solution will work with current version of Plex Server. I suppose if Plex doesn’t have an answer soon, I’ll build a 6 or 8 core socket 2011 Plex server that should be able to play multiple transcodes. However a NAS only solution would be preferred.
QNAP does use internal players to allow multiple streams, and offers Kodi and Emby.
My take on this issue is that most NAS servers are running more advanced GPU’s and other media players are taking advantage of them, or are starting to. Plex should at least explore this option or give us a yes or no answer so we can plan ahead and purchase proper equipment.
I totally agree that Quicksync is not perfect, you can’t have faster speed without loss of quality. However in most cases when one is transcoding it’s to a phone or tablet. So at that point it would not matter if quality is not the best since most people will not notice. One assumes direct play would be used going to a large TV.
I think there are ways of taking advantage of both Intel and AMD GPU’s to help with transcoding. Even if not fully transcoded on the GPU. Anyway, that’s just speculation on my part. I think that would really win over not only tradition PC based Plex server users, but also a ton of NAS users.
Plex please at least give us some clue on this. I have a feeling more and more people will switch over if you guys don’t at least address the issue and give us a timeline.
Finally I think most will agree Plex has it’s good sides, but the under the hood stuff like this might push many away. Just saying.
As I add more clients my CPU is coming under pressure! Quicksync is the solution that would solve this problem for me and then I won’t even need to look at other solutions. Please implement quicksync!
@AlexDua said:
Yes money always speaks. I tried Emby , my first impression wasn’t good. I am personally thinking either a NAS for storage and dedicated Plex Server PC. Or just a NAS, as long as it can play 1080 to at least two devices. But as things stand I don’t think the NAS solution will work with current version of Plex Server. I suppose if Plex doesn’t have an answer soon, I’ll build a 6 or 8 core socket 2011 Plex server that should be able to play multiple transcodes. However a NAS only solution would be preferred.
…
Plex please at least give us some clue on this. I have a feeling more and more people will switch over if you guys don’t at least address the issue and give us a timeline.
Finally I think most will agree Plex has it’s good sides, but the under the hood stuff like this might push many away. Just saying.
Well stated. It’s inconceivable that a technology so relevant to the core function of Plex has been ignored for years, and with nothing but a single generic comment from the company to boot. How the company is not interested in a technology that would allow its product to run on Intel-based NASes and cheap, power efficient Bay Trail servers I simply don’t know.
Keeping an i5-type system running 24x7 will cost most people around $60+ a year in electricity just for idle time. Running it instead on a NAS can bring that cost down to $6. That savings is almost the entire cost of a monthly Plex Pass. Plex could easily advertise QuickSync support as a way to make Plex Passes “free”, and for some reason they’ve decided not to do it. It’s completely inexplicable.
@raptor22a said:
Keeping an i5-type system running 24x7 will cost most people around $60+ a year in electricity just for idle time. Running it instead on a NAS can bring that cost down to $6. That savings is almost the entire cost of a monthly Plex Pass. Plex could easily advertise QuickSync support as a way to make Plex Passes “free”, and for some reason they’ve decided not to do it. It’s completely inexplicable.
The $6 vs $60 is not something that people worry about as much when they buy hardware for thousands of dollars. With that said, rcombs answer in here still stands. There has not been a way to build a multi-platform way without using Intel’s proprietary MFX libraries. That is of course a no-go. But I am fairly confident that something will happen as soon as something GPL-compatible surfaces.
The $6 vs $60 is not something that people worry about as much when they buy hardware for thousands of dollars. With that said, rcombs answer in here still stands. There has not been a way to build a multi-platform way without using Intel’s proprietary MFX libraries. That is of course a no-go. But I am fairly confident that something will happen as soon as something GPL-compatible surfaces.
Perhaps I’m different than the majority of users - but it’s difficult for me to imagine your average Plex user is spending thousands of dollars for hardware. I typically envision home users looking for an easy way to have family and friends access media. That requires no more than a system that can be put together for a few hundred dollars. Or for many people, it’s just leaving their desktop on 24x7, where the cost of running Plex is purely the added run time for a preexisting system.
Clearly many people do think $60/year is significant. If they didn’t, every Plex user would have a Plex Pass - something that obviously isn’t the case.
The $6 vs $60 is not something that people worry about as much when they buy hardware for thousands of dollars. With that said, rcombs answer in here still stands. There has not been a way to build a multi-platform way without using Intel’s proprietary MFX libraries. That is of course a no-go. But I am fairly confident that something will happen as soon as something GPL-compatible surfaces.
Perhaps I’m different than the majority of users - but it’s difficult for me to imagine your average Plex user is spending thousands of dollars for hardware. I typically envision home users looking for an easy way to have family and friends access media. That requires no more than a system that can be put together for a few hundred dollars. Or for many people, it’s just leaving their desktop on 24x7, where the cost of running Plex is purely the added run time for a preexisting system.
Clearly many people do think $60/year is significant. If they didn’t, every Plex user would have a Plex Pass - something that obviously isn’t the case.
Absolutely. 60 dollars per year is a lot for some, but if you forced my hand to make me do a guess, most Plex users do not care about that sum when it comes to their media center.
Thousands of dollar would be me including everything they spend on their media center. Stuff like NAS, disks for the NAS, client hardware. But also the TV if one wants to lengthen the argument.
But I can be wrong. It has happened before. Once or twice…
But I also said that Plex is looking into how to solve the conundrum. But it will take time. It is not something that will come out the next couple of weeks or even months.
@raptor22a said:
Keeping an i5-type system running 24x7 will cost most people around $60+ a year in electricity just for idle time. Running it instead on a NAS can bring that cost down to $6. That savings is almost the entire cost of a monthly Plex Pass. Plex could easily advertise QuickSync support as a way to make Plex Passes “free”, and for some reason they’ve decided not to do it. It’s completely inexplicable.
The $6 vs $60 is not something that people worry about as much when they buy hardware for thousands of dollars. With that said, rcombs answer in here still stands. There has not been a way to build a multi-platform way without using Intel’s proprietary MFX libraries. That is of course a no-go. But I am fairly confident that something will happen as soon as something GPL-compatible surfaces.
Personally, I’d love to see them release a version of the transcoder that supports QuickSync on the platforms they can NOW. If it’s not available on all platforms it’s not ideal, but it’s not the end of the world either. Gracenotes doesn’t work on FreeBSD so the advanced music library features don’t work on that platform.
Call it Experimental and get the feature out on some platform(s) as there will be problems that need working out. It’s going to take time to get right so why not get started now? This would also open the doors to start working on Nvidia and ATI solutions also.
I suppose the other issue is universal support? OpenCL should solve it? I think they can’t give Quicksyc to one platform and neglect the others? Perhaps that is the problem?
They may not want to do that but they certainly could do that. Either way they will always have to fall back or be able to use the CPU for transcoding.
I agree I don’t think any of us would mind testing it or using it “with risks” AKA beta test. Maybe it’s not on top of to-do list. Or worst case the current platform can’t support that? Ok, I will stop here. I hope they post something within the next 60 days. I will be making some choices on my dedicated Plex server by then and I hope it will still be Plex.
Fwiw, QSV is 5-10x faster than OpenCL and CUDA. I just want to throw that
out there. I would prefer QSV for its speed and low-power CPU/platform
candidates.
I agree with what has been said about quality of the transcoding when using a GPU acclerated variant: Transcoding is mostly relevant when streaming to mobile devices, or when you’re on the move/on a wireless connection/non-reliable connection where most of us are limited by either datacaps or bandwidth anyway. So a lower quality stream is expected and a fine tradeoff for not having to run a super beefy Plex server at home that runs 24/7.
I also don’t see that investment of thousands of dollars. I’m a new Plex user, and for the most part I have a home entertainment system already. Plex was just an addition to that, so I wouldn’t sum up that entire cost of my entire media center just because of Plex. Quite the contrary. I started using my available Desktop to also run PMS, but I wouldn’t want to run it 24/7 since it’s an older system that is not really power-efficient.
I’m currently looking into hardware for running something 24/7, but as long as I need a “super-computer” to do some basic transcoding, that is not going to happen since I’m not willing to spend upwards of 500EURs on hardware that isn’t used with a bare minimum of power-efficiency in mind.
I can understand that Plex doesn’t want to fork development of the PMS for different platforms to keep it simple and only manage a few codebases, but there should be other solutions: like make the PMS extensible/provide a Plugin interface or something that allows to replace or alter the transcoding process. I really don’t understand why as platform X user that has libraries available I should be held back by some missing libraries for the platform Y, or the other way around.
If Plex is not willing to do it themselves, at least give the developers out there a way to try it and come up with an extension, much like the unofficial channels.
I’ll bump. Even though some of you seem pretty heated. I understand your frustration. Believe me so does the plex team. You just have to also understand that there were hundreds and hundreds of posts just like this about SSL and how they could not believe plex was not figuring it out and bringing it to us, so for you guys who are saying this about quick sync needs to get that there are lots of other forums on here with people saying the same exact things about what they feel is the most important part of plex that needs updated/features. You really cannot make everyone happy.
I’ve been with plex for years and just run my cpu 24x7. It started small, but it is an investment. Especially with all the extra movies you start buying (or renting ;). ) because your want to build your library. Plex always comes through and they will come through on this. Just give it time.
@Terry Cinemas totally agree with what you just said.
You just have to keep in mind each user will have certain functions they consider “mandatory”. It’s always been this way and probably always will be. Overall Plex is doing a GREAT job IMHO.
However, in reality this feature (GPU transcoding) is more than a “typical” feature request in that it can help many plex servers overcome CPU bottle necks in many ways. The Transcode engine (ffmpeg) is used by a lot of different processes in Plex, the heavy hitters are BIF/index creation, SYNCing, Media Optimizations, direct stream and transcoding media on the fly.
These are a lot of the “key” features of Plex that make it stand out from other media servers. With each new release of features that rely on ffmpeg/transcoder the situation gets a bit worse on the CPU front causing many people to not be able to use the features. Look at how many people can’t/won’t use SYNCing because it puts a hurting on the CPUs and causes system resource problems.
So this one “fix/addition” would allow many people to go back and use other features already available. Not to mention that some NAS servers someday down the road might be able to take advantage of GPU encoding and actually be able to transcode on the fly.
So beyond the “simple wants” of those in this thread it could/would be a really good new feature for Plex as a whole even if it were only available to start on Linux and Windows.
I doubt there is anything in this post Plex isn’t aware or thought of. If I were a betting man I’d say that GPU encoding is currently being looked into/experimented with in development but we will probably never know until it’s released as Plex doesn’t usually release details like this until they are ready to.
But the main point is that it’s up to each user to voice what feature they think are most important to them so that the collective “wisdom” of the users can factor into new additions of the software. If no one speaks up then the feature would apparently not seem important overall. So it’s something of a catch 22 when we don’t know what’s being actively looked into or being worked on.
@cayars said: @Terry Cinemas totally agree with what you just said.
You just have to keep in mind each user will have certain functions they consider “mandatory”. It’s always been this way and probably always will be. Overall Plex is doing a GREAT job IMHO.
However, in reality this feature (GPU transcoding) is more than a “typical” feature request in that it can help many plex servers overcome CPU bottle necks in many ways. The Transcode engine (ffmpeg) is used by a lot of different processes in Plex, the heavy hitters are BIF/index creation, SYNCing, Media Optimizations, direct stream and transcoding media on the fly.
These are a lot of the “key” features of Plex that make it stand out from other media servers. With each new release of features that rely on ffmpeg/transcoder the situation gets a bit worse on the CPU front causing many people to not be able to use the features. Look at how many people can’t/won’t use SYNCing because it puts a hurting on the CPUs and causes system resource problems.
So this one “fix/addition” would allow many people to go back and use other features already available. Not to mention that some NAS servers someday down the road might be able to take advantage of GPU encoding and actually be able to transcode on the fly.
So beyond the “simple wants” of those in this thread it could/would be a really good new feature for Plex as a whole even if it were only available to start on Linux and Windows.
I doubt there is anything in this post Plex isn’t aware or thought of. If I were a betting man I’d say that GPU encoding is currently being looked into/experimented with in development but we will probably never know until it’s released as Plex doesn’t usually release details like this until they are ready to.
But the main point is that it’s up to each user to voice what feature they think are most important to them so that the collective “wisdom” of the users can factor into new additions of the software. If no one speaks up then the feature would apparently not seem important overall. So it’s something of a catch 22 when we don’t know what’s being actively looked into or being worked on.
Carlo
I would almost say I want this as much as I want an actual wake on lan. If we are talking about money saving… And wear and tear.
Be it QSV or OpenCL, in a year or two we will need some kind of GPU accelerations, HEVC is coming, along with 10bit and 4K, how are we supposed to stream to mobile devices without help from GPU?
