I recently tested playing an Av1 file on my Plex server with Intel UHD 630 and the dashboard showed it was using hardware transcoding Av1 to h.264. Device manager also showed that the GPU was active. If memory serves, HW transcoding of Av1 on Intel requires UHD 730 or newer or Ampere/ Lovelace on Nvidia. Does transcoding Av1 to h.264 work on UHD 630? I’m also potentially looking for a low profile card for my SFF server. Pretty set on keeping the current machine and Windows. I was thinking a T400 for tone mapping support or a 3050 for tone mapping and Av1. Any words of wisdom?
There are two parts to a transcode, decoding the current format and encoding to the desired format (H.264 8-bit for Plex).
UHD 630 graphics cannot decode AV1 video. It can encode to H.264. When transcoding AV1 with UHD 630, you will not see a (hw) for the decode, but you will see a (hw) for the encode portion of the transcode.
Intel 11th Gen CPUs and later support decoding AV1 video (Wikipedia: Intel Quick Sync Graphics).
Nvidia Ampere and Ada Lovelace support AV1 decoding. See Nvidia Encode / Decode Matrix.
You do not mention which OS you are running.
When running Windows, Intel graphics are not supported for hardware accelerated tone mapping with public or beta releases of Plex Media Server. However, there is a Forum Preview release (pre-beta) that does support hardware accelerated tone mapping with Intel graphics. See [Plex Media Server] Forum Preview for Tonemapping on Windows with Intel iGPUs .
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That is very helpful! Thank you for the information.
The information above is very helpful but due to a bug with plex or some other unknown reason with the transcoder, Nvidia Ampere and Ada Lovelace will not decode AV1 currently. I have both generations of cards (a2000 and a2000 ada) and no matter what i try i can not get them to do av1 decode. across multiple installs of plex on windows 10, 11, and server (all of them running in a vm) it will not do HW av1 decode on the gpu and defaults to the cpu (software) to decode.
I know it does not work correctly with the Nvidia RTX 4500 ada generation GPU. CPU is doing the decoding for me. I run another server using competing software and my GPU is decoding the AV1 files. Seems Plex has a way to go before AV1 con be used reliably.
