Plex Media Server Logs_2018-08-14_18-46-58.zip (13.4 KB)
My server didn’t have enough CPU power to transcode 4K movies down to 1080p. So I installed an Nvidia Quado P600. Now CPU usage is down from maxing out all cores to pretty much nothing, and the Nvidia GPU usage graph shows 10% GPU utilization during transcoding. But when I transcode 4K movies it still buffers every ~10 seconds. I’m trying to figure out why this is happening. I deleted the logs to start fresh, enabled debug logging, then streamed a 4K movie with real-time transcoding to my phone. Before you say it’s a wireless issue I have this same issue in Chrome on my PC and on my Nvidia Shield, both of which are connected via Ethernet. (When I force it to transcode down to 1080p)
The stream buffered twice during the logging if it helps at all.
Tried moving the movie locally to the server since it was on a NAS. No improvement. Moved the transcoder cache folder to a RAM disk. No improvement. What the h311? I don’t see how there could be any bottleneck now.
Can you try again and provide a new log without the verbose logging? Just debug is fine.
Plex Media Server Logs_2018-08-15_11-04-34.zip (145.0 KB)
Here’s the debug logs from 4K transcode to 1080p on my Nvidia Shield. Subtitles not enabled.
That file does not have the server logs. That looks like it’s the plugin logs folder.
Plex Media Server Logs_2018-08-15_13-39-05.zip (237.5 KB)
Hopefully this is better. It seems Plex takes a while to write the logs to disk.
Is there a reason the server wouldn’t be writing the server logs? I just have transcoder logs.
None that I can think of. There are logs from that time period so the logging is working. You can try getting the logs manually.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/220347688-accessing-internal-storage/
Plex Server is running on my Windows Server 2012 R2 box. I’m running the transcode again and watching the C:/Users/user/AppData/Local/Plex Media Server/Logs directory. I’ll just keep running it until the server logs show up I guess.
Oops sorry. Got the Shield mixed up. That’s your client. Odd that the server log doesn’t show up.
Plex Media Server Logs_2018-08-15_14-20-35.zip (237.1 KB)
Think I got it this time. For some reason it wouldn’t write the server log until I restarted the Plex server.
Ok. There isn’t anything specific in the logs to indicate the problem. All I see is that PMS is using the NVidia hardware and something causes the transcode to fail early.
First, I would check to make sure you are using the latest NVidia drivers. The video you are trying to play is also a 10-bit HEVC file. The hardware may be having issues with that too, so I would try out an HEVC 8-bit file to check if the 10-bit might be the issue. I would also try transcoding some h264 files just to check that the encoder isn’t stopping early for other reasons.
Plex doesn’t have a lot control over the NVidia encoder so if there is a problem there, not much can be done.
Would killing the stream from the server cause the transcode fail message? The stream kept going until I killed it under the activity section of Plex server. I’ll try and find an 8-bit HEVC file.
What? Did you kill the transcode? Yes that would cause an error in the log. I didn’t see any pauses in the log, but maybe it was too short to get logged. Please try again and allow the buffering to occur a few times and try to note the playback time when this happened so I can try to identify them.
Yes I killed it from the server. I found a H264 4K file and that transcodes to 1080p just fine. Is it normal that a H264 transcode uses 40% of the GPU but the HEVC transcode that Plex is choking on only uses 5-10%? I’ll try the HEVC and get the playback time when it buffers. I think my video drives should be up-to-date since I installed this card and the drives a week ago.
Plex Media Server Logs_2018-08-15_17-40-09.zip (73.5 KB)
I don’t have any HEVC 8-bit files. The H264 4K files are 8-bit and they transcode fine. Here is the log. The stream froze a handful of times.
I tried to catch the times. I think I missed one near the beginning of playback.
0:22
0:58
1:12
howdy, i have the same problem. H264 files are transcoded correctly. The problem are H265 files with HW transcode. if I disabled hardware support, transcoding will work.
I testet 8 Bit files.
System:
Ryzen 5 2600
NVIDIA Geforce GTX 970
Ok, I’m seeing some slowness in your system.
Aug 15, 2018 17:36:17.220 [7200] DEBUG - Completed: [192.168.1.113:41018] 200 GET /video/:/transcode/universal/session/3326ebf85b45152a-com-plexapp-android/base/00023.ts (19 live) TLS 2116ms 2575600 bytes
This indicates that the client took 2.1 seconds to receive this 1 second of video, which would explain the buffer you see.
Aug 15, 2018 17:37:07.366 [0596] DEBUG - Completed: [192.168.1.113:41057] 200 GET /video/:/transcode/universal/session/3326ebf85b45152a-com-plexapp-android/base/00057.ts (17 live) TLS 2204ms 2413356 bytes
These are around the time you indicated but I see this slowness often in your file. So it appears that sometimes, the client receives the portion of the video fine, then at times, it slows down and gets backed up which causes the buffering.
The log also shows sometimes it doesn’t receive the full segment. PMS does not show any actual errors so my suspicion is that the hardware decoder in your hard just isn’t able to handle the 10-bit hevc codec.
