Server Version#: Version 1.21.1.3876
Player Version#: PMP Version 4.47.3 windows
Hello,
I built a new Windows 10 system and it’s primary purpose is to be a Plex server and HTPC on the living room TV. When I built it, Intel QSV worked fine and the server was happily transcoding multiple shows at a time with fantastic quality. However, I’ve since added an Nvidia GTX 1060 Video Card on it so I could do light gaming on the TV. When I read this article, I was under the assumption that Intel QSV is the preferred hardware transcoder if both hardware are present. However, Plex Media Server always tries to decode and encode using the 1060’s hardware instead of Intel QSV. I normally wouldn’t care but when the video card is under high load, like when gaming, Plex Media Server doesn’t transcode fast enough and streams suffer. I’ve switched it to software encoding for now but my library consists mostly of HEVC/x265 which is hard on the software encoder. Is there a setting somewhere where I can pick which hardware Plex Media Server prefers to hardware transcode with (Like OBS or stream homestreaming) or am I stuck with software encoding until I remove the video card?
I’m not sure that switching to quick sync will improve your gaming/transcoding necessarily, the gpu decoder/encoder function is separate from the 3D processing, so 3D load should have minimal effect on transcoding.
That said if the game is using a lot of video ram, it won’t be available for transcoding.
Finally, if the gaming heavily loads the cpu itself, then it could also bog down the transcoding and work not done by the gpu (ie audio transcoding, any subtitles processing, and all other processing not specific to video decoding/encoding.
All that said, plex tends to use whatever windows uses as the default desktop gpu.
So if the nvidia is your primary/only display, the plex will use that.
If you have 2 monitors, you can set the primary to intel gpu, and use nvidia as the second.
It’s been a long while since I’ve run pms on windows, but that is how I remember it.
Hopefully others can chime in on their experience and maybe have some other suggestions.
Thanks, I just like that QSV has a higher quality than the 1060’s encoder so that’s preferable. It works fine on software now but it does use quite a bit of CPU so transcoding slows down games.
Anyway, I’ve tried hooking up the TV back into the onboard HDMI. I also went into BIOS and set the integrated iGPU on the CPU as primary display. Even without monitors connected to the 1060, Plex still prefers to use it. Obviously Plex is prioritizing the nvidia API over the quicksync API so the hardware transcoding guide is a bit misleading.
I wish this was simpler with a setting like a drop down on which API Plex should try to use for hardware encoding/decoding. I’m gonna try to run Plex on a hyper-V VM or Docker with the Intel QSV exposed to the VM/container. I’m not sure even if Intel QSV can be exposed using VT-D but I will report back whenever users quiet down a bit.
