Server Version#: 1.14.0.5470
Player Version#: 1.14.0.5470 / web
I have Plex launch via windows ‘Task Scheduler’ when windows starts and whenever it has to hardware decode a video, (tested with x265 video) the Plex server exe crashes immediately. I’ve seen similar complaints from the PMS / Service thread here on the forums as well. If I login and launch Plex from the start menu, everything works as expected.
This only occurs when hardware decoding is necessary… playing music or native x264 videos work fine when Plex is launched via Task Scheduler.
Has there been any progress on this or has anyone looked into this? its a very easy to reproduce bug and I’m shocked that it is still not resolved. I’d be willing to work with Plex tech support to try and get an idea of whats happening .
Same issue here. Running on Windows Server 2016 as a service, with Intel 630 IGPU. All available Windows updates have been installed.
It crashes instantly once I start to play any video which requires transcoding. If I disable “use hardware acceleration when available” it doesn’t crash and uses the CPU instead.
If I stop the service and run Plex as a program, transcoding works fine.
Plex Version : 1.14.1.5487
Intel GPU Version : 25.20.100.6373
I’ve tried everything I can think of, as soon as you launch a video that needs transcoding you’ll see a 2nd Plex Media Server.exe (Suspended) appear in task manager and then both disappear almost instantly.
It is definitely a bug and I don’t think Plex will ever fix it. I may have to look into emby since my CPU isn’t fast enough to transcode 265 on the fly in ‘software’ mode
Requiring applications needing access to the graphics card to be launched from the login session is pretty standard across operating systems. On Unix/Linux systems one can get around this requirement by changing permissions on the graphics device but I know of no such mechanism on Windows. You should look into auto-login and launching the appropriate applications in that context.
How exactly would one do this? Like, what are the (exact) commands?
This sounds like the solution to the problems I’ve been having (running Ubuntu 18.04 headless on a NUC8, PMS crashes whenever hardware acceleration is enabled).
Since I’m using windows, I don’t have an answer for you regarding Linux… but on the windows side, I’ve figured out how to get this to work. I use Kodi as well as Plex, since plex does not support my tv tuner card I’m forced to use kodi for TV… kodi has an app called ‘kodilauncher’ it starts as soon as windows logs in and launched kodi (and any other app I want) so I simply have it launch plex as well… and now plex is running under a user and not as a service so hardware transcoding works
