My Plex Server is a 4th gen Haswell CPU with Intel graphics so I can use hardware encoding/decoding with Quick Sync as an option. It has worked great to reduce CPU usage but I hit a snag. I have a group of H.264 videos that is had a problem with. It may start and work for a few seconds, but that’s it. Once I remove the hardware acceleration mode, they play fine. (All this is remote from another location so that transcoding is being used - not local at home).
My first guess is the 8 reference frames, but I’m not sure. Are there specs available from Intel on what QS supports? What parameters, exactly?
I’m also not sure if Plex is throwing up on the encode or the decode of the video. Is there a way to set it to ONLY encode OR decode for testing purposes? Thanks.
Shot in the dark here. Your media info lists “Header Stripping” on the video, this was a feature of matroska that never really caught on, much to the chagrin of the matroska devs. They turned it off be default years ago after kicking and screaming about getting other devs to support it didn’t pan out. It’s barely supported outside of pure software implementations, and wouldn’t shock me at all if its not supported in intel’s hardware decoding engine.
You can remux in mkvtoolnix by selecting each track, and set “Compression” to "No extra compression then multiplex. You can also set this as default by going through the menu at the top, “MKVToolNix GUI”->Preferences->Multiplexer->defaults, and check “Disable additional lossless compression for all track types”. It’s really only applied to subtitles these days anyway, and space savings is pretty minimal comparatively. The extra comparability might save you headaches later.
Beyond that, the files looks well in spec for QSV, even the lowest version could decode 1080p High@L4.1, that file is well below that.
