I am currenly upgrading my Plex server and want to expand to multiple transcoding due to multiple users. I had in mind to use a GPU for that purpose but research shows that some NVIDIA GPUs are limited to 2 transcoding due to software limitation. I have also learnt the the Quadro GPU line to not face this issue because they are not bound by the NVIDIA software on the PC thereby allowing several transcoding simultaneously. I just want to confirm this, if anyone have tried.
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Yes, I can confirm this. I just purchased a p2000 myself and LOVE it. I’ve had up to 10 streams going at once, and it’s been working great. My cpu barely even gets used at all even with all those streams going.
And it can even transcode blurays to all other formats or sizes in minutes, instead of hours. I wish I would have bought this card a lot earlier.
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What model P2000 did you buy for this? I was looking at the PNY Quadro P2000 VCQP2000-PB 5GB 160-bit GDDR5.
I got this one: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133644
What OS are you running? I’m 99% about to buy one, but need to figure out my OS situation first. I would love if this worked with linux…
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My current Plex server is running Windows Server 2012 RC
I can’t confirm that it does work with Linux, but I think it should, given that nvidia does support hardware acceleration on linux.
Either way, I can confirm it works on windows 7x64, which is what I’m using for my plex server.
Is there anything special to get this going?
I’ve tried with my brand new P2000 (HP version) in Linux, Windows, Docker, etc, installing the drivers straight from Nvidia and nothing works. The GPU definitely works. Plex just refuses to use it.
Are you running these in a VM? I’m not sure if the P2000 has the same issue but with my P600 I had to set hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = “FALSE” for my VM so ESXi didn’t tell the guest it was a VM. Otherwise Nvidia won’t let the drivers load because they want you to buy one of their super expensive cards for VMs.
I’ve tried in a VM and bare metal. And since it’s a Quadro, Nvidia shouldn’t care. But even on bare metal Windows it’s like Plex doesn’t even see the card, despite it being there.
Is there any particular configureation you have to do on thr PC to use the card?
Not for me there wasn’t. All I did was plug it in and load the drivers. Plex immediately started using it, and doing hardware encode/decodes.
Is hardware accelerated HEVC transcoding working for you on the P2000? I bought a P600 and Plex is using it but I’m still getting buffering on the local network going from HEVC 10-bit to 1080p H.264.
OK thank you, was just wondering.
The P2000 in Linux will only be used for encoding right now, but NOT decoding. So in linux the CPU will decode and then the P2000 will encode. This is because the Plex Transcoder uses an older version of FFmpeg.
Is this the same case for Windows? I had my P600 on Windows Server 2012 and it looks like it’s doing CPU decoding and GPU encoding.
No in Windows you should be able to do decoding and encoding, BUT the P600 will only support 2 streams.
I had one stream going and it said HEVC to H.264(hw). No (hw) next to HEVC which means it’s using the CPU I think.
That is correct. Are you using the P600 as your main video card as well? If the server has an onboard video card then use that for your monitor, and then have the P600 dedicated to transcoding and not rendering the display.
The server is a VM. I passed the video card through via DirectPath I/O. The server also had the VMware virtual graphics adapter as a device.
