HW Transcoding should be working better on Shields with Android 9 (Experience 8). Still broken on Android 11 (Experience 9).
2 Likes
HW transcoding seems broken across multiple devices. Iām getting CPU usage at around 25% even though no audio is transcoding, and nothing else has changed. I donāt need to be using more electricity given the massive increase in pricesā¦ oh and the latest updates in general have seen a massive nosedive in stability.
Is it tone-mapping? That part is still done in cpu so there will be usage for it.
Also, the cpu on a Shield is not very powerful. It doesnāt take much to get it to 25% load. Is that 25% across all cores or 1 core maxed at 100%. The latter is very likely for tone-mapping as I believe that is a single core process on the Shield.
Thanks.
I do have Shield Experience 8 still and things were fine with SE 8 (Android 9) on PMS 1.23.x till April 5th.
On 4/5 I got the new Plex player update which prevented playback of ANY TrueHD media on all devices (Android, Roku etc. - that is when the large āTrueHD is borkedā thread was started by someone here). In any case, I was then forced to get PMS Beta 1.26.0.5715ā¦ It helped get clips playing again.
Todayās issue is with a combination that I rarely use, so I cannot say for certain if that worked with PMS 1.23.x or notā¦
But I do see a number of people saying that PMS 1.26.0.5715 Beta did NOT fix HW transcoding.
I will get the logs / check the logs later when I get a chanceā¦
1.26.0 fixed a known transcoder issue around interlaced videos. I would need specifics on what isnāt working to check.
1 Like
Maybe the following 2 observations for the same clip will give some clues / help you with any potential root cause:
I reproduced the issue with 2 videos (playback on the Shield itself) - It happens only TrueHD clips as noted.
Also if I manually select the AC3 audio stream (āMoreā > āPlayback Settingsā > āSelect Audio Streamā and change it from TrueHD to AC3 it plays back very quickly with no issues. The same approach worked for both videosā¦
The odd thing, is when I select the AC3 Audio stream, there is NO video transcoding - For Video it It says āDirect Play (HEVC)ā (and obviously for Audio it says āDirectPlay (EAC3 5.1)ā.
However , for the same clip, when I select the TrueHD audio stream, it says transcoding for Video too! 'Transcode(HEVC(HW) - H264(HW)
I will post this in the other thread for continuity.
No tone mapping, this is with 1080p hevc. The cpu usage is usually 5% or less. Even with a direct stream of audio, and video only transcode it was all over the place. Plex Media Server itself, rather than any transcoder service is responsible for the cpu usage, but thereās no reason why.
@kevvybear Reproduce and provide me the Android and server logs so I can check what is going on.
Sorry for the intrusion but, is there no answers about the hardware transcoding with PMS in Nvidia Shield with Experience 9 yet?
Thank you for your time.
On another thread I posted this:
I am still on Android 9 with Version 1.26.0.5715. I enabled hardware acceleration to test. Shockingly HW transcoding does work.
Just a reminder that NVIDIA Shield Experience 9 runs Android 11. This is the version that has been confirmed to be affected, where HW transcoding does not work.
NVIDIA Shield Experience 8 runs Android 9, and HW transcoding does still work, from what Iāve gathered.
Please be careful not to confuse āAndroid 9ā with āShield Experience 9ā, they are different versions of Android.
it is my understanding it was broken on Experience 8 as well. But they just recently released an update that said HW transcoding was fixed. But then MovieFan confirmed in this thread above that it was fixed for Experience 8 but that it was still broken on Experience 9. See post from January on Experience 9 having issues as well.
1 Like
Which device are you testing on and what type of clip?
For TrueHD based clips, HW transcoding is kicking in and not working in my case on one of my remaining non-4K TVs I am testing on - that TV is getting replaced Wed).
Also even with earlier versions of PMS than 1.26 Beta, it depends where you are playing back the clip and which version of PMS you have:
It was not only Shield Experience v 8.x that was needed for HW Transcoding to work when playing back on the Shield itself, but also PMS 1.24.x or earlier to have no issues (see specifics below in italics).
Quote from MoveFan.Plex:
It depends on what firmware you are running.
Android 9
HW trasncoding [transcoding] broken when playing back on the Shield itself with PMS 1.25+.** No fix yet.**
** There maybe an issue with DD+ audio too with 1.24+ (still investigating)*
Android 11
HW transcoding broken regardless of PMS version. We are investigatin**g some sort of incompatibility with Android 11. Not sure where the problem is.*
So on the Shield itself, it does not work on PMS 1.25 (even if you have Shield Experience 8.x (Android 9).
I am on the 2019 Shield. I donāt play back content directly on it, just use it to stream plex.
Hi. Any news with HW transcoding issue in Experience 9?
Thank you for your efforts with it.
Hi all,
New PMS version (1.26.1.5772) installed in SHIELD and still no news of hardware transcoding. People Āæis it fixed for you in any way?
Thank you in advance
Please, donāt answer all at the same time. Iām overwhelmed with all your solutions, Out of jokes. No one has this problem now? Are all fixed?
BR
Just downgrade from 9.0 to 8.2.3 and no more problems.
Thank you for the advice. As workaround itās OK but is not a final solution.
I agree with you, 3 months, still not any fix with Nvidia experience 9.
That a pretty long period of time. Nvidia said that was Plex issue and nothing more, did they help Plex in background ? How many Plex engineer are working on this issue ? I really donāt knowā¦
In my opinion PMS on shield is not the most frequent setup in plex universe. So there is not lot of people working on it. The problem will probably stay for a long time ā¦
Anyway for us thatās a main Feature, I can still see the plex support page that is talking about Shield TV Hw Transcode, without any notice of the current state.
Loose probably weeks to try differents things and finally downgraded my shield to 8.2.3 was the only working method.
The thing is that you can brick your Shield and loose guaranty with this method.
Iām a bit pissed of that situation too but what can we do?
