Hardware transcoding issue

[ChuckPa]

I have not had any time to test Debian 12 yet.

PMS finalized base AMD HW support (SDR-only) in 1.32.5.7210

Given how PMS now does “auto detect” on the GPU.

1. The Radeon built into your Threadripper will be enumerated first
2. The Nvidia will be enumerated second

Before 1.32.57210. The Radeon would not have been listed at all and the Nvidia would show as /dev/dri/renderD128.

Now, it’s renderD129 having been displaced by the Radeon.

For the device to use, Are you using “Auto” or have you specifically selected the Nvidia ? (Settings - Server - Transcoder - Show Advanced). Might be worth revisiting that given AMD support exists

ALSO – if you’re going to test the Radeon, turn off HDR tone mapping.
– The Vulkan drivers aren’t released yet (tone mapping libs)
– SDR from a Radeon still looks DARN good (imho)

Lastly,
I’m not certain of the Nvidia 535 drivers. Reports are all over the map.

I just tried to reload the lab machine and now it fails to boot at all.
(complete mess – Nvidia has a problem with 535)

[SuperTeddy]

According to the CPU specs Integrated Graphics: No.

There’s only /dev/dri/renderD128 on guest VM.

It does not matter if I select Auto or the specific GPU.

I would downgrade back to 525, but apt-get & aptitude are both refusing to install the 525 packages even after purging *nvidia* and all related 535 packages.

I will just stay on PMS 1.32.4.7195 + 535 for now. Will check again when new nvidia drivers or PMS is released.

[ChuckPa]

I have resolved the issue here but am not happy with the result.

Ubuntu 22.10 DESKTOP is required to make this work with the Intel CPU and Nvidia 3060 GPU.

It has installed 535 drivers

[SuperTeddy]

I figured what was causing my issue.

It was due to having CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 in the env variables for the docker. This works for PMS 1.32.4 and older to select which nvidia GPU should be used, but messes something up for PMS 1.32.5.

But this option is actually not needed with the new Plex since you can select GPU in the interface now.

So all good now for me on Plex 1.32.5 + nvidia 535.

[ChuckPa]

@SuperTeddy

Thanks for letting us know.

I’ve been battling with Nvidia and Ubuntu this past week.

Today, I finally won (a very small victory; both QSV and Nvidia work)

[eSascha]

HW transcoding not working on PMS Version 1.32.5.7349 and Nvidia 535 for me. I don’t have anything specified in the env variables.

just this

    deploy:
      resources:
        reservations:
          devices:
            - capabilities: [gpu]
    devices:
      - /dev/dri:dev/dri

[Franck_Ehret]

Hi,

I have the same Plex version, GPU works like a charm but I have 525 drivers (Almalinux).
If I can remember right, 525 were (highly) recommended for GPUs.

I also use those env. variables instead of “devices” in my compose file:

NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all
NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=compute,video,utility

[eSascha]

ok, thank you, am back to 525 driver and transcoding works again.
but its weird, I was using an older version of Plex (June or July version) with 535 driver and transcoding was working then. so I said I’m not touching the GPU driver anymore, just updated Plex and PMS

[Franck_Ehret]

Yeah, that’s the thing: it was always a combination issue, making the troubleshooting even harder😊
Glad it works know!

[macvirii]

I’ve had problems with transcoding on the web player… it seems that some of the quality profiles have some problems, usually with ac3 audio decoding together.

Same movie, transcoding on the Windows Plex App, where the audio transcode to OPUS it just works.

When in the browser, nvidia-smi shows for just a second the job and then it locks.

I was on the 535 driver, downgraded to 525 just to test, but I can’t say for sure that the trascoding was working correctly on 535 on the Plex App, just that it wasn’t on the web player.
On 535 same config the gpu selector was not showing the gpu, now on 525 it is.

Full Specs:
Proxmox VE 8 as hypervisor
Ubuntu 22.04 virtual machine
Plex 1.32.6.7468 on Docker
Nvidia RTX 3050 525 driver
Edge Version 116.0.1938.76
Plex for Windows Version 1.69.1.3755-e00242c8
Dell T430 with 2 Intel Xeon 2660v4 and 64gb of ram

Docker command:
sudo docker run
-d
–name plex
–network=host
–runtime=nvidia
–device=/dev/dri:/dev/dri
-e “NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=compute,video,utility”
-e “NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all”
-e TZ=xxxxxx
-e PLEX_CLAIM=“xxxxx”
-e PLEX_GID=1000
-e PLEX_UID=1000
-v /opt/plex/config:/config
-v /opt/plex/transcode:/transcode
-v /mnt:/mnt
plexinc/pms-docker:plexpass

Will keep testing to see if I have more transcoding errors outside of the web player and report back.

[gmllama]

Finding this saved me from a lot more headache. Thanks for confirming. I did a rollback from 535 to 525 and the magic (hw) confirm suddenly started popping up.