I’m trying to decide whether to buy a 1050Ti for my qnap ts-873 (AMD RX-421ND cpu) for HW trascoding.
Can anyone confirm if this is supported , including reliable 4k trascoding?
I have read very mixed reports but they are all a few months old,
I understand you install the qnap nvidia drivers, enable HW decoding etc.
Have you asked in the Qnap forums?
Did you look in the Qnap compatibility section?
I have the ASUS Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB Phoenix Fan Edition in my TS-1277.
It transcodes when using Plex but
A. I don’t watch 4k (waste of resources IMO)
B… I am not sure how many transcodes I get (rumored 2 is the limit.) (I have most of my media coded to not transcode)
C. When checking while ‘plexing’ (2 or 3 transcodes ?) the card shows virtually no usage (under 5%)
I decided to purchase the card and return if not happy…
in case anyone else is considering here is my experience after a few days:
GPU trascoding is pretty reliable with this card. However this is limited to a single stream 4k. I tested a trascoding to 1080p High quality, on about dozen random 4k h265 rips. There was only one rip which refused to start (it played transcoding from my other qnap)
The 1050TI never hits 40%, the CPU usage is high and can peak at 87% at times which must be due to the audio trascoding.
My other QNAP the ts453bu with the intel J3455 CPU will hit about 20% on the same streams. So the on chip GPU and Realtek ALC662 seems to make for a much more efficient trascode despite the x73 series CPU having twice the passmark and the 1050TI being a more powerful GPU.
The big issue is that the gpu can’t do hardware decode yet so the cpu still gets hit when running multiple streams.
My gpu maxes out at around 4% usage when encoding with plex.
My 1050ti and TS-473 cope just fine with encoding video, it’s the audio format that kills transcoding. Anything master audio or dolby hd converted to AAC pegs the cpu pretty hard. (Fine for 1 or 2 streams though)
I think the 1050ti must be decoding video. I can see the gpu kicking in as soon as I transcode and averages 30-40% on the resource monitor. Before purchasing this card 4k transcode was not possible for me.
Assume you have the drivers installed, latest version of plex installed (manually) and hw transcoding enabled. It’s definitely the audio that’s taxing the cpu as you say.
The latest PMS 1.18.4-2171? has and additional check box to enable GPU encoding as a work around for people experiencing problems with the new transcoder. Make sure both boxes are checked. Won’t do anything for the audio, that still happens on the CPU.
Yes, running latest version, nvidia driver and kernal installed.
Both options ticked in plex. gpu see very little usage. But as said, plex works fine for me anyway, just be nice to see decoding working.
On qnap, nvidia gpu only does encode, no decoding. it was on one of the stickied posts by chuck on this forum that we need to wait for next version of qnapqts for decode to work too.
Ive seen mention of a 2 stream limit with nvidia gpu’s, is this correct?
For consumer NVidia cards, yes that is true and is an NVidia limitation. On NVidia’s enterprise cards (Quadro series), NVidia removes that limitation.
Or the driver hack?
I too am looking at investing in a low profile 1050ti and then discovered that it can be installed in the Qnap x73 (dont own this yet but am considering), but Im then struggling to get any confirmation around whether it is going to work as I hope - usually things never work the way you expect them too.
What I envisage is (after reading up on a few things) is that you should be able to assign the card to a VM, so lets say a W10 VM running on the Nas and use this as your PMS. Install the appropriate drivers to unlock the transcoding capabilities of the card, and hey presto…
Although I suspect the reality will be nowhere near expectation!
If you install in a TS-x73 box (non-embedded GPU) + low profile 1050ti + NVidia drivers, then you can run the native Plex Qpkg with HW transcoding (requires plexpass subscription). Will work better that way then win10 VM due to less overhead.
Thanks…
Don’t suppose you happen to know if the modified drivers that remove the 2 stream transcoding limitation can also be used??
So the official answer is that would be something that Plex wouldn’t provide support with (may or may not work).
I have played with the script on Github and it does have to be modified to work on Qnap’s driver installation.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
