EDIT: SOLVED: It ended up being a driver issue, which was a bit of a red herring as Handbrake transcoding using Quick Sync worked fine. I just downloaded the latest drivers from the Intel site.
I am running Plex Server on a Windows 11 Pro MiniPC with an N100 CPU. For several months, hardware transcoding has worked well as the N100 CPU does support it via Quick Sync. This has been verified via the Plex dashboard having the (hw) noted beside active streams and very low CPU load. Sometime in recent weeks / month, hardware transcoding has ceased to work and everything is being software transcoded, as verified in the Plex dashboard and by observing very high CPU usage.
Testing methodology: Streaming several different 4K video files to the Firefox browser, which doesnāt support 4K and so transcodes to 1080p. I also manually forced transcoding in the playback settings of some 1080p files to play in 720p or lower. Also forced transcoding in the Mac and Windows Plex clients via playback settings. Only repeated software transcoding is observed. Subtitles are turned off for this testing.
Troubleshooting so far:
Rebooted server. Restarted Plex. Disabled and re-enabled āUse hardware transcodingā on server.
Verified in my Plex account settings that I have Plex Pass.
Verified that my N100 CPU is being recognized by Windows as Quick Sync capable by using Handbrake to transcode videos using an encoder that uses Quick Sync (e.g. āH.264 (Intel QSV)ā).
Plex Transcoding Settings:
Transcoder quality: Automatic
Enable HDR tone mapping: Disabled
Disable video stream transcoding: Disabled
Use hardware acceleration: Enabled
Use hardware-accelerated video encoding: Enabled
Hardware transcoding device: Auto (Intel UHD Graphics is also listed)
Server Version#: 1.41.0.8992
Player Version#: Firefox 130.0, Chrome 128.0.6613.138, Mac Plex Client 1.99.0.210-2d92b948
To help troubleshooting efforts, I played 2 video files (Dr. Strangelove and Skyfall) on the Firefox browser for Mac, which caused transcoding from 4K down to 1080p. No subtitles. Screen caps of the activity dashboard and XML output from each video fileās āget infoā are attached. I have also attached the logs zip file grabbed after the two files were played (now removed as issue is solved).
For starters I would try and set the Hardware transcoding device to QuickSync instead of Auto and try that. I also check the HDR tonemapping as it should only use when HDR is not supported on the display.
I donāt use QuickSync but I had a problem with NvENC before and after I updated my drivers and did a full reboot, it came back. Incase that helps as well.
Good luck.
If I have time later I will check the logs and see if I can find anything else.
Hi - appreciate the response. The only two options I have under the Hardware transcoding device are āAutoā and āIntel UHD Graphicsā. The behaviour I described (always using software transcoding) is identical for both. I checked my drivers on the Win 11 Pro Plex server and they are the latest (released in July).
I did a scan through the logs and found the following potentially-relevant entries (a āā¦ā denotes that the above and below lines are not contiguous in the log file):
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:54.852 [664] DEBUG - [Req#2331/Transcode] Codecs: testing hevc (decoder) with hwdevice d3d11va
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:54.853 [664] DEBUG - [Req#2331/Transcode] Codecs: hardware transcoding: testing API d3d11va for device ā0ā (Intel(R) UHD Graphics)
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:54.854 [664] INFO - [Req#2331/Transcode] [FFMPEG] - Using device 8086:46d1 (Intel(R) UHD Graphics).
ā¦
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:54.903 [664] DEBUG - [Req#2331/Transcode] [FFMPEG] - Format d3d11 requires hwaccel initialisation.
ā¦
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:55.128 [664] DEBUG - [Req#235a/Transcode] TPU: hardware transcoding: using hardware decode accelerator d3d11va
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:55.128 [664] DEBUG - [Req#235a/Transcode] TPU: hardware transcoding: zero-copy support present
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:55.128 [664] DEBUG - [Req#235a/Transcode] TPU: hardware transcoding: using zero-copy transcoding
ā¦
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:55.131 [664] DEBUG - [Req#235a/Transcode] TPU: hardware transcoding: final decoder: d3d11va, final encoder: qsv
ā¦
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:55.928 [3076] DEBUG - Jobs: āC:\Program Files\Plex\Plex Media Server\Plex Transcoder.exeā exit code for process 9572 is 1 (failure)
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:55.929 [13272] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Changing client to use software decoding
ā¦
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:55.978 [13272] DEBUG - TPU: hardware transcoding: enabled, but no hardware decode accelerator found
ā¦
Sep 18, 2024 14:24:56.263 [7952] DEBUG - Transcoder: session zs1elaeagnkgav1btdfaqkch indicated fallback to software decoding
Okay, what driver did you end up moving to? I am in the same position as you for Auto/UHD in transcoder options. I donāt have any options for quicksync. Trying to figure this out on my Win11Pro mini PC too! Same N100 CPU. Thanks!
You know, driver doesnāt matter. I updated to the latest. I still only see Auto/UHD. It does show (hw) in the dashboard when transcoding, but no quicksync option in the transcoding settings. Did yours show up? @jeffn13
I am on driver 32.0.101.6077, released on September 12. I see there is now a later version but I think Iām going to stay on this one for awhile as everything seems to be working. Anyways, my device list in the transcoder options has always only shown āAutoā and āIntel (R) UHD Graphicsā, regardless of driver version and whether or not hardware transcoding was working. The only exception is that on the previous driver (the one that seemed to break hardware transcoding) I would sometimes see two identical entries for āIntel(R) UHD Graphicsā, but this duplication is gone with the driver Iām on now.
