Server Version#: Version 1.13.9.5456
Player Version#: Multiple
It is my understanding hardware transcoding should be working for this configuration, but isn’t from what I can tell. The videos starts at a transcoding speed of 1.8 then dips below 1 and it starts buffering. The media file is in a MKV container, encoded as VC1 with DTS.5.1 Audio. Anyone have any ideas? I’ve read in a few places that VC1 is harder to transcode, is this true? Is the PR4100 incapable of transcoding on the fly? Should I be reencoding any VC1 files into H264?.
A few other things from my logs.
I see this message which I believe indicates that the HW decoding isn’t on. Is this a general hardware problem or unsupported transcoding format? VERBOSE - * vdec_hw_status => 0
I also saw this warning in my verbose logs:
WARN - Sync: local sync directory “/mnt/HD/HD_a2/Nas_Prog/plex_conf/Plex Media
Server/Cache/Transcode/Sync+” does not exist
Decoding VC1 is performed on the CPU, not using h/w acceleration. The CPU in the PR4100 is not powerful enough to keep up in real time, which is why you see the transcode speed drop below 1.0.
Encoding to H264 can take advantage of h/w acceleration. You should see “to H264 (hw)” when checking Status -> Now Playing in Plex Web during playback…
Process the video with Handbrake or similar s/w to convert it to H264, so it plays without transcoding.
From the info I can find, many Intel chips with QuickSync support hardware decoding of VC-1. I have a Synology DS218+ with an Intel J3355, which is supposed to have hardware VC-1 decoding support. Is there a reason Plex doesn’t support hardware decoding of VC-1 via QuickSync?
