The GPU is an i5-4440. That’s enough for HW transcoding.
Radeon HW transcoding (nor any AMD transcoding) isn’t yet supported. We need to wait for MESA support which will be some time.
Please check:
ls -la /dev/dri - You should see renderD128 and others. These should be a member of group video. If not video, take note of which group is assigned and:
groups plex - to see if PMS picked up the correct video group. It should have.
Subtitles will always be CPU transcoded because the GPU doesn’t support it.
Lastly, Certain codecs do not have HW transcoding support. Can you provide the media section of the XML (Get Info -> View XML) which shows which codecs are in use?
Command sudo vainfo to see if the drivers are visible.
Plex brings its own. If you see MESA, then the AMD drivers have taken over. I do not know how to correct that.
For your first question i have no idea, regarding for your second i will be able to take the card out later on, what would you like me to do when i take the card out ?
Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Cache/Transcode/Sessions/plex-transcode-dj8dpo8o0ri0igmrcuu86kk1-d3701ca6-c9e2-4c59-b4e4-e3076b0b9c15/temp-0.srt]
Jun 11, 2019 09:00:53.077 [0x7fecd9ffb700] DEBUG - TPU: hardware transcoding: zero-copy support present
Jun 11, 2019 09:00:53.077 [0x7fecd9ffb700] DEBUG - TPU: hardware transcoding: using zero-copy transcoding
Jun 11, 2019 09:00:53.077 [0x7fecd9ffb700] DEBUG - TPU: hardware transcoding: final decoder: vaapi, final encoder: vaapi
Jun 11, 2019 09:00:53.077 [0x7fecd9ffb700] DEBUG - Job running: EAE_ROOT='/tmp/pms-fe2685c4-1baf-4fcf-9112-8a71535f1881/EasyAudioEncoder' FFMPEG_EXTERNAL_LIBS='/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application\
final decoder: vaapi, final encoder: vaapi
There is no control mechanism in Plex to determine which resource to use.
It must have found your Radeon first and stopped searching further but then disqualified it as not-supported. The same behavior exists with nVidia GPUs in a system. If the nVidia is present and found, the iGPU is ignored.
Well i tried hw transcode and i see that the playback has some sort of blurriness/pixels whereas the normal transcode does not i suppose that is an issue of me not having a strong enough cpu ?
If not are there some settings that i can change in order to get some more juice out of the cpu ?
Hi! I planned to build a small server for plex and other things.
I wanted to buy a 220g or 2200g, but I also wanted the hardware transcoding.
From you post it seems that HW transcoding on AMD gpu on linux is planned right?
An other question: do you know if there is any quality difference between Nvidia and Intel HW transcoding?
Hardware Transcoding on AMD “has been discussed”.
Plex Engineering doesn’t give roadmap info so there is no way of knowing IF (or even WHEN) such a capability might happen.
Normal quality associated with the generation of CPU/GPU that you have. HW transcoding works but doesn’t do well with low bit rate video (under 8Mbps) which for a phone or tablet would not be an issue. If quality is more important then stick with software transcoding otherwise hardware upgrade to Broadwell (6xxx) or later for better results.
That is a tough call, the built in GPU on Intel chips for transcoding is just such a value vs buying a more capable AMD to do same number of streams in software transcoding. Software does have the advantage of avoiding codec obsolescence should a new one be released and works with a wider range of bit rates. An i5 or Ryzen 5 are good candidates for 3 to 4 concurrent 1080p streams, the new 3000 chips look promising enough to warrant the additional expense. A 2600 should give you double your current cpu.
