I just upgraded my Plex server to a I5-9600K and have hardware transcoding working just fine. Unfortunately when its enabled the quality of the video is absolutely horrible. Some movies are blocky and overall it looks like things are playing back from an old VHS.
Is this normal and is there anything that works better? I know quality is lower with hardware transcoding but this is shockingly bad. Will adding an NVidia card improve this or is hardware transcoding just that bad?
Thanks.
I have been seeing this on my i5-8500. It seemed to be working like a boss a few weeks back and now it is basically useless. I have reverted to software transcoding for now. I did find that rolling back to an older build of PMS fixed the HW transcoding quality. I am assuming a recent update broke quality somehow. haven’t tracked it down yet though.
EDIT: V1.17.0.1841 - Hardware Transcoding is working as expected. able to handle multiple HEVC 1080P to 720P streams without any noticeable loss in quality.
Good to know it’s likely a bug and not just HW transcoding in general.
Can any one from Plex confirm this?
Is anyone else noticing this? I see a post about pixalation in the first 60 seconds but nothing about overall lack of quality.
Here is another thread discussing it.
Thanks for the heads up
Yes I’m having issues with dvr recordings having the problems.
Transcoding, especially 480p/1.5mbps/low bitrates, looks like complete trash on latest releases of PMS (Windows 10, Intel QuickSync on Skull Canyon NUC, 32GB RAM, SSD…)
I am still having this issue and had my brother test on his Plex server as well. Movie quality is all over the map when HW Transcoding is turned on. Sometimes its watchable and others its not. It does seem worse with low bitrates but happens all the time. I see other forum posts about the first 60 to 90 seconds of a movie being pixalated but this seems different.
Any chance someone from Plex can at least confirm this is a know issue? If its not and its specific to a particular setup I want to pursue making changes.
Thanks.
Guys,
All I want is a yes/no this is a know issue. Can a plex employee respond please?
I believe the issue has been identified as a problem with the Intel QuickSync drivers.
This post has some additional information:
https://forums.plex.tv/t/use-hardware-acceleration-when-available/506037/6
Including:
The workaround is to either a) disable hardware acceleration or b) delete the offending driver.
For somebody running PMS on Windows, is there a specific intel driver version I can reference that utilizes h/w transcoding w/o destroying the video quality?
I’m running an i5-7600k
Based on this I just updated mine (i5-7600k) to the Dec 18th drivers and I am still having terrible pixalation (unwatchable) with HW Enabled. I assume this is the “Crash” but can you tell me where to look to confirm this is the same issue? Is there a log file somewhere?
Also does anyone know if this goes away if I get an Nvidia card for the system?
Thanks.
If you are on Version 1.18.4.2171, you could try disabling the added feature “Use hardware-accelerated video encoding”. This would determine if the artifacts are being introduced in the Decoding or Encoding phase. It’s unfortunate that the Intel Drivers are clashing so bad right now with the updated Plex Transcoder.
Switching to Nvidia seems unnecessary but it was the focus for this new transcoder so likely more QC testing was done.
So any progress on this? I’m worried about the new poster issue if I don’t update my PMS but I can’t live without hardware transcoding.
I’m the same as I’m still currently running v1.17 because of the terrible transcoding quality bug introduced with 1.18 when using Hardware Acceleration on my intel NUC on Windows running a coffee lake CPU. But with the TVDB api changes and requiring to update to the latest version, I’m now stuck with choosing between having no further TV artwork or updating and having ridiculously bad quality with anything that is transcoded using hardware acceleration (with HW+ being one of the main reasons I bought Plex pass).
It’s a known issue. I’ve been having the same problem. I’ve been talking with @sa2000 about it for the last few days now. Hopefully this can be fixed “soon™”
This is a disappointment because I currently run my Plex in a Hyper-V VM… was experimenting with Intel standalone computer I had acquired to use with Quick Sync and ran into this problem.
Reverting to 1.17.0.1841 did eliminate the blocks but only seems to transcode to 720p and doesn’t look anywhere near as good as software transcode.
Should I get a P2000 or are there issues with that? Don’t want to spend $$$ only to find out more problems.
I have asked this question before and not gotten a clear answer. I too would like to know if this problem effects the NVIDA cards as well.
