I am using Ubuntu 18.04 with a Skylake 6600k CPU. I am using the internal GPU for my monitor. There is no other GPU.
In the admin UI transcoder options, the “enable hardware acceleration if available” option does not appear. Is this because I do not have a Plex Pass ? I would assume there would be a link to sell me a Plex pass if that was the case, as there is for some other options like Sync, but there is no such link here. Is this because the GPU is not being properly recognized ? And if so, how do I fix it ?
I saw that it was working for a 4K HDR HEVC to 1080p HDR conversion for a client that didn’t didn’t support HDR or HEVC. However, what surprised me is that my server couldn’t keep up. This was a single stream, and nothing else going on the server. CPU looked like it was at about 80%, all of it used by Plex Media Server. Is this expected ?
My CPU is an i5-6600k overclocked at 4.4 GHz on all cores. I would have expected it to be able to keep up. Am I off base ?
Thank you. The article is helpful if using software transcode.
The specific movie I was transcoding was Tenet which is 4K HEVC 10-bit, about 85 Mbps.
In one case, I used the Plex client on my Samsung Q70R TV. Everything was fine with direct play. Then I turned on subtitles. Everything fell apart as that triggered a transcode. Don’t recall what format it was being transcoded to - I’ll try again.
Another was playing the same movie on Odroid N2+ under Kodi with the Plex add-on. By default, HEVC hardware support was unchecked, and a transcode was triggered too, probably to H264. The TV was 1080p. When I checked H265 support, everything went fine as it switched to DirectPlay.
Unfortunately, the page you listed has no guidance about the transcoding capabilities of each GPU. My Ubuntu server that is also my NAS and runs Plex Media server has a dual boot with Windows 10. I’ll try to run some benchmarks with Powerdirector on the same CPU, both with software encode and hardware encode, to see if it can keep up or not.
In any case, that PC has all 7 PCI and PCIe slots fully loaded, mainly with storage and network controllers. There is no room to add a GPU. The only possible CPU upgrade is to Intel Gen7 CPUs, but that would probably not be enough of an improvement over my i5-6600k.
Replying to myself here - I tested PowerDirector under Win10 with and without Quicksync. It was able to do an encode of Tenet (4K HDR HEVC) to H264 1080/24fps 16 Mbps using about 80% of CPU when Quicksync was on. It couldn’t keep up when encoding to H265/4K HDR 50 Mbps.
I guess some more powerful nVidia or AMD GPU would be required. But given my full motherboard, and the GPU shortage at the moment, I think I’ll pass.
I guess I need to stick to client devices that don’t require server transcoding. But I can’t find a single device that can play all the content properly with DirectPlay. I’ll post another thread to inquire.
Thanks. Actually the Odroid N2+ I already own handles 4K HDR directplay with DTS-HD/TrueHD passthrough just fine also with Kodi and Plex.
I tested it with a Marantz NR1603 receiver and a Sharp 3D TV. The N2+ was playing back at 1080p SDR obviously. I didn’t test the N2+ on my 2 other setups which have 4K projector and 4K TV respectively. But I assume it would play the 4K HDR natively then.
Unfortunately, neither the N2+ not the nVidia Shield Pro can handle 3D MVC content.
