Hi, I have Plex perpetual subscription and can use hardware acceleration. I realized that after a few changes in my server, Plex is not transcoding as fast as before, and not able to keep the stream going flawlessly. In addition, I see that my CPU is under consistent heavy load. However, it seems that everything is correctly configured and the GPU is correctly at Plex disposal for hardware transcoding. In Plex settings, hardware acceleration is enabled.
My question then, is there a way to be sure that Plex is using hardware acceleration for transcoding? Perhaps I can check the logs somewhere.
You should be able to see that on the now-playing section of the server’s dashboard (or the Plex Dash app). If media is transcoded using hw-acceleration, those transcodes should be labeled as Transcoding (hw).
If your CPU is still seeing heavy load that implies the video isn’t transcoded by the GPU. This can i.e. be the case if you need to burn subtitles into a video.
I guess we really learn something new everyday. I turned off the subtitles and the CPU load dropped to 2% and video stopped lagging.
I had not noticed this in the past. Is there a subtitle type that does not require burning to the image? Some of my library has PSG and some of them have TXT file extensions.
That’ll depend on what client/platform you use to stream your media.
Plex will support native playback of image based subtitles (VOBsub, PGS) on a number of platforms (e.g. iOS/tvOS).
My plex server is running on a Win10 machine with a i3-9100T with Intel HD 630 iGPU which supports 4k HEVC 265 10bit encode/decode, I have premium, and enabled HW acceleration in settings and it still refuses to use the iGPU quicksync. No subs on. Any ideas?
