Server Version#: 1.13.8.5395
Player Version#: 3.67.1
Before we get into the details I would like to share my server specs.
OS: Windows 10
CPU: i5 4200
RAM: 16GB
GPU: 2x Geforce GTX 960 (Latest Drives)
What I would like to know is if these specs will enabled hardware acceleration? I have the option available on the server settings and I have the option checked.
I have seen this message in the logs while attempted to play a 4k video via the web player.
“TPU: hardware transcoding: enabled, but no hardware decode accelerator found”
Any ideas and thoughts on this would be great. My library is slowly expanding to 4k content and I have a handful of remote users. I have been managing at least a 1080p version of most 4k files, but this is getting kind of old since most of my setup is automated but this.
Plex won’t use your graphic adapters if it finds a Intel quicksync-capable cpu.
Your cpu has the Quicksync extension - however, your cpu is a ‘Haswell’ generation. As such, it has only support for H.264, MPEG2 and VC-1 video codecs.
But 4K video is encoded with the HEVC codec, for which your cpu has no hardware support.
Disabling the Intel Graphics did not force Plex to use GPU’s. What options are there for this server? Plan an upgrade path? I was hoping to use the GPU’s for something other than collecting dust.
Get an Intel cpu from the ‘Apollo Lake’ (or newer) generation.
It doesn’t have to be top of the line, it doesn’t have to be a Xeon.
Just a solid Core in.
You do have some options other than a new CPU, which also means a new motherboard & memory.
You could get a GTX 1050 or better GPU (see aforementioned matrix). Note that Nvidia GTX GPUs are limited, by Nvidia, to two concurrent transcodes. The third concurrent transcode will use the system CPU, not the built-in Intel GPU.
Addition:
One other option, which doesn’t cost anything, is to simply restrict 4K material to 4K capable devices.
I keep my 4K material in separate libraries and do not make it available to my remote users (none of which have 4K systems). This eliminates the need for some serious CPU cycles to transcode 4K movies. I can run PMS on my NAS w/ a Celeron CPU.
Also, transcoded 4K HDR doesn’t look very good anyway. Plex is still working on tonemapping 10-bit HEVC to 8-bit H264. As such, colors on the transcoded video look washed out. It will get fixed eventually. However, for the time being it is best to avoid transcoding HDR material.
If this is correct, can I interpret it to say that I am able to use NVENC (with a supported card of course) on my dual Xeon X5650 server for hardware acceleration in Plex? I read another post (here?) that seemed to indicate that Plex wouldn’t enable or utilize hardware acceleration at all if it didn’t find a Quick Sync capable CPU, regardless of detected video hardware. I’d appreciate some clarification on this
Does the NVENC only process video encodes? And is that the reason for the answer in the post I read re: CPU must have QS?
If 2 is true, is there a workaround to allow audio encodes in software (should be very fast on my server) while pushing all video encodes to NVENC (or similar)?
Final question (perhaps better served in a fresh post): Does the Intel VCA or VCA2 fill in as a substitute for CPU QS support? I assume it would, and I wouldn’t add any NVENC capable devices if I used a VCA… of course, my server only has PCIe 8x slots, but if I could get a VCA installed via an adapter / riser board I might consider it…
Support depends a bit on the operating system.
On Windows it also depends on whether you are running PMS as a system service or not.
(as a service, you can only use hardware encoding, not decoding)
Your best bet would be to get a nVidia card of a recent chip generation. The newer, the better the chance of support for more modern video codecs.
I’m using PMS as a service on Windows… I’m not concerned about decoding for local viewing on the server itself, but if running as a service disables hardware decoding of h.265 titles prior to sending them out I will definitely disable the service wrapper! This little tidbit has escaped my voluminous searches of the “PMS as a service” thread and support pages… this is HUGE! This really needs to be listed at the beginning of his post and download page, but that’s outside your scope, I understand.
Now that I’ve spent some time researching (and finally getting solid answers), I’m completely rethinking how I’ll run PMS… using my dual Xeon X5675 server sounded like a good idea on the surface, but due to lack of hardware encoding / decoding support I’ll be using a Core i5 2320 desktop system and a (yet to be purchased ) NVIDIA Quadro P2000 to do the heavy lifting. I really had no idea… perhaps a fresh post with my results would help others… gathering this information was excruciatingly difficult :-/
In my use case I believe I will… The Quadro cards have unlimited encodes, whereas the Geforce cards are limited to two simultaneous encodes. Since I have a couple dozen users on my server I could use the extra threads. If it were for my use only I would tend to agree.
Also, the P2000 / P4000 cards are readily available for $400-600 used on eBay, which is similar to the 1080 cards’ current price… easy choice for me
