Awhile back many of us reverted back to 1.17 because 1.18 introduced some issues with hardware encoding resulting in intermittent pixelation of the picture. Recently I reluctantly upgraded because Plex was no longer going to support certain features (artwork) with 1.17. It looks like the hardware transcoding issues remain with my hardware set up. Note that this is not an issue in 1.17. This is only an issue in 1.18 where many hardware encoding changes were made. I can easily fix the issue by turning off hardware encoding, unfortunately with the number of streams I usually have going that is not an option. I am posting here to see if anyone has found a workaround to this yet or does anyone know if the Plex team is aware and working on the problem?
Server Hardware Set-Up:
Intel Core i7-7700K (Kaby Lake)
Intel HD Graphics 630 (Kaby Lake-S GT2)
Microsoft Windows 10 Professional (x64) Build 17763.914
If this always happens with specific files, please post an XML file or two. Similarly, please post PMS logs that include the time you’re experiencing a pixelated picture.
Before generating log files, make sure in the Plex Server settings that debug is ON and verbose is OFF.
Client is AppleTV Gen3 (typo -> meant gen4)
Movie was Knives Out which I ripped to my HD 1080P. I watched 2 minutes from a remote location with hardware encoding on and it was pretty bad. I changed the quality to 8Mbps 1080p and it was still bad and then went into the server and disabled hardware encoding and it looked perfect after that (8Mbps 1080p).
There is sensitive informations in the log files. Can I DM message it to you. Since this happened last night I will have reproduce the problem for the logs to capture it as I do not see logs from last night listed.
If that’s really the case (and you don’t have an Apple TV 4 or 4K with apps available from the App Store), then that Plex client is not officially supported by Plex.
I tried to send you the logs through a private message but it says you are not accepting messages at this time. Can you please accept messages so I can send to you?
Thanks I have sent you the logs and posted an XML to the forums. I stand by to help in any way I can. This issue is very important to me. Thanks for your quick replies and helpfulness.
Thanks to many suggestions on the Reddit forum I upgraded my intel graphics driver to 26.20.100.7755 (1/9/2020) and that has largely fixed the problem. It is not perfect, but it is watchable.
This exact problem has been present for several months and there are numerous posts on the forums about it but for some reason it has yet to be resolved.
The only solution I found was to roll back to one of the 1.17 versions as anything 1.18 introduces this issue and makes anything that is hardware transcoded pretty much non watchable. Turning off hardware transcoding fixes the issue, but one of the main reasons I bought Plex pass is so that I could use the hardware transcoding function. Worked fine up until 1.18 but has been broken ever since.
I check the forums several times a week hoping this has been fixed, but serveral months later it still remains unfortunalty, so I stick with 1.17.
I see various people posting that some have been resolved but mine remains broken. I’m rolled back to 1.16. So far anything after that for me does not work. I saw an interview with the CEO (I think) who stated that the best way to get a resolution to an major issue was to keep posting in the Forum. Well it appears that happens regularly yet no definitive steps on how to resolve this. I would suggest some kind of official acknowledgement of the issue and some central thread on what to do. Right now I get the impression that this may not have risen to the top of the priority list.
Unfortunately it does not look like updating the graphics driver is a complete fix. It helps on some videos but still getting tons of complaints from my users. Looks like I may have to convert my build to Linux. This sucks.
