I have Hardware Transcoding Selected in advanced settings, but it appears to work randomly, some of my 4K Movies stream to my devices and others don’t.
Watching the Task Manager on the windows machine that runs the server, sometimes it uses the GPU and everything is fine, others times, it 100% CPU transcoding that crushed the server..
attached is the logs.. any help is appreciated.
Thanks
Plex Media (686.8 KB)
The log file on your screenshot is not included in the zip file. The rest of them doesn’t contain any hints about the playback events.
Please include the full zip file
Odd that, but I added it here. The Zip Files that was attached was what was running at the time I uploaded the post.
thanks for pointing that outPlex Media Server.log (5.0 MB)
As far as I can see, there is a video-thumbnail creation running in parallel. That could be responsible for the additional cpu load.
If you want to know whether a particular playback is using hardware transcoding, always refer to the Now Playing status in the web app. It will show (hw) after the codec name if hardware is used.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/
Awesome, thanks for the tip. I can confirm then that its not Transcoding on certain files..
I just ran Black Panther 4k but it did not show the (hw) on the “Now Playing” screen. can you help me figure out why? here are the attached logs.
Could you post the Plex XML info of this video, please?
Sure Thing, here it is
Black Panter 4K.xml.txt (60.7 KB)
Did you find the reason?
Depending on the CPU in your machine, it could be that only 8 bit color depth is supported by the hardware.
This file has 10 bit color depth.
Another thing to check is the subtitles. The hardware transcoder cannot handle these PGS subs.
I’d disable the subtitles and try again.
Maybe you could post the XML of a file where the hardware transcoder is working?
That’d be a good comparison.
Is there a place to look up if my process supports the 10 Bit?
I have the Intel i7-7700 with the Intel® HD Graphics 630.
My Understanding is that is does 10 Bit decoding, is there somehwere I can confimr that?
Now that you have asked for one, I can’t get ANY of the 4K movies to use Hardware Transcoding, I have tested several.
Jurassic World, Arrival, The Accountant ALL played with hardware transcoding (watching it in the Task Manager) but none of them are now,
That tends to indicate that is a bigger problem right?
Yes, the HD 630 officially supports 10 bit color depth and HEVC.
Did you perform the playback test with disabled subtitles?
Do you have several GPUs in this machine? (e.g. one in the GPU and one in a separate graphics adapter)
Sometimes the embedded GPU is disabled when a separatze graphics adapter is added. This is usually determined in the BIOS settings.
Did you install the latest Intel graphics driver? Sometimes Windows only installs generic driver software which doesn’t activate all features of the hardware (particularly after major Windows Updates).
Thanks for the information:
No other GPU’s installed only the HD 630
The Server’s Intel Graphics Driver was downlevel, I updated it to current.
I checked, Subtitles where on, I disabled them, and re-ran the test. No, (HW) in the “Now Playing” but nothing ever played on the device, just a spinning circle. but this time, it said “Direct Stream” but converting to MP4?
But Nothing appeared to be happening on the computer
Apparently it tried to send the video and audio streams without any change to the client.
Over a mobile data connection.
This produces almost no cpu load, so that is an explanation for the low cpu load.
But more concerning to me is: why was it trying to send a HEVC video with 50 mbps average bitrate over a mobile data connection to a mobile device?
Which bitrates did you set as upper limit in the iOS client?
Original, my upload speed is 50MB, so I don’t mind sending the original quality if it prevents me from having to transcode and crush my poor CPU.
Also, it sat in that state for several minutes, and nothing started playing
I did try lowering it to 1080P with no Subtitles and it worked fine (HW) showed up in the “No Playing”
are subtitles going to be supported at some point with hardware transcoding?
Yes, but we are trying to test the transcoder here, so we must of course provoke transcoding. And that is most easily done by restricting the target bitrate.
This I cannot tell you. I only know that ffmpeg currently has no hardware acceleration for burning in subtitles.
You could conduct another test:
Take any SRT file you can get your hands on and place it beside the movie file.
(identical filename, except the filename extension)
Afterwards, select this subtitle instead of one of the PGS subtitles.
Repeat the playback test.
Are the results now different?
So, interesting enough, i remade the MKV Files with just the some random SRT and the Video and Audio. (see below)
Rescanned the Library, and when I played (no subtitles) there was NO GPU transcoding… all CPU, which I don’t understand at all.
When I enabled the Subtitles, with the SRT, it started transcoding with the GPU, no problems. Attached are the logs
