Hi, Im looking for info and help regarding hardware transcoding. I have seen videos and sites about people using their GPU to transcode instead (or as well as) their CPU.
How do i make plex use my GPU instead of CPU? I’ve looked through the settings and cannot find anything to do with hardware transcoding.
Is there an add on or app i would need to load as well as plex to allow this to happen?
Im runing a windows 10 pc as a plex server and its only an i3 dual core, which works fine on most 720 streams and 1080i as well, but very limited to two stream at a time.
is it easy to use a gpu instead? I have a 1060 6gb card i could use but have no idea how to set it up?
If it is a Broadwell or later i3 just turn on HW transcoding, save. Start a watching something and change to a lower rate stream then check the dashboard to see if it is doing 1080(hw)->something(hw).
I understand that, and know I don’t have one. What I was asking was doesn’t your server have to be signed in, in order for someone who has Plex pass to see the hardware settings under transcoding?
Hi, so i also have an i7 2600K cpu, its old now, but if i run my plex server on that and the gtx 1060 6gb card and tick that box (yes i do have plex pass) , am i right in assuming that the plex will automatically use the gtx card to transcode? is it that simple? (sorry for the noob questions, im trying to understand the server side better)
hi tiebierius, there is nothing i can do except tick that “use hardware transcode” in the options and just hope for the best right?
is there no other add on or software that can aid this or force this?
I went and re-read, your opening statement. The gtx 1060 is limited to transcoding two streams in Windows do to the drivers. If you try to do more at once, it is my understanding that Plex will try and use CPU for other streams. I heard there is a patch for the drivers, but that is not Plex. That is some third party thing, you will have to Google for it.
One last bit of advice, as a Plex pass user, it is my understanding that in remote access you can set your upload speed and max bit rate per stream.max bandwidth and transcoding limits.
Also if you have many family members that want to watch at the same time I would think of optimising movies, so they only have to be transcoder once for the most part.
That is the only option in Plex Media Server. Hardware Accelerated Streaming is either enabled or disabled.
Plex uses the default/primary GPU in the system, which is set in the system BIOS. Most people change this when installing their GPU card. It never hurts to double check if you think hardware acceleration is not working correctly for some reason.
Hint: On my system, with a Gigabyte motherboard, the Gigabyte boot logo appears only on the primary video output. Other mobos may be similar.
In addition to Task Manager, you can use tools such as HWMonitor to look at CPU & GPU utilization.
Nvidia GTX cards are limited by Nvidia to two concurrent transcodes. The third concurrent transcode will use your system CPU.
Nvidia Quadro cards do not have the two transcode limit. Note that some cards, such as the GTX 1030, have Nvidia imposed limitations and cannot be used for hardware accelerated streaming. The list of capabilities for Nvidia cards is online: Nvidia Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix.
Your 1060 has no NVENC/NVDEC limits that would affect Plex, other than the two simultaneous transcodes, so you’re good to go.
This 2 limit was patched for linux and windows 10. I don’t think any other windows versions can be done due to the patch is specific to the windows 10 driver.
The instructions are not that great but patching is done at 2 levels. The dll patch once, then for every boot a small program needs to run very quickly to up the limit to 32. I had 14 movies transcoding at the same time the other day after doing the patch. That’s 14 decode and 14 encode streams in total.
My experience:
An Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 should be able to reach 20 transcodes but the hard drives or CPU might max out before that point. RAID or several physical drives may be needed as well as enough CPU to cover container and audio transcoding which I believe is only done by the CPU. I have 12,000 passmarks and 24 cores worth of CPU and was held around 40% CPU and 65% GPU during these 14 streams. My decode was noticeably more loaded than the encode. Most of the source media were around 20 mbit/sec while the transcodes were 10 mbit/sec output. I was happy with these numbers and how well the GPU was able to take the super workload and still have leftover. I imagine this $200 GPU could revive an old plex server to something very capable.
