Is there a different way to do it? I have an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1245 v3 @ 3.40GHz with a built-in GPU and I’m surprised it can’t transcode 4K HDR → 1080p without the client buffering every 60s. It’s either not fast enough or something else going on. All CPU cores are at 100%, how much power does real-time transcoding really need for a single client?
From Plex Media Server.log: Nov 21, 2022 01:22:41.309 [0x7f7112f0ab38] INFO - [Req#d087a8/Transcode/c0e19fdf-90bd-4629-8833-949317dbe541/eba51361-31ac-445c-9608-b80a360d00e4] size= 543222kB time=00:26:53.40 bitrate=2758.2kbits/s speed=64.4x
You may need to add TranscoderLogLevel="debug" to Preferences.xml.
Stop PMS.
Edit Preferences.xml.
Add TranscoderLogLevel="debug" at the end of the file, before the />.
ex: ... ExistingSetting="value" TranscoderLogLevel="debug"/>
Start PMS
The transcoding speed is also displayed in Tautulli, https://tautulli.com/:
Excellent answer, thank you. I enabled TranscoderLogLevel="debug" and when playing an optimized version it direct plays, I can see log lines of the form: Nov 22, 2022 23:24:52.855 [0x7f8e2ffcdb38] INFO - [Req#57090/Transcode/9s5e7ipubjt9gj9sl54hmf8a/17541e91-d194-46a8-b411-40fd506742e1] size=N/A time=01:39:59.31 bitrate=N/A speed= 472x
But if I select the original version which is 4K HDR10 (HEVC Main 10) and look in the dashboard it is transcoding to 1080P (H264) but no log lines with speed info show up in the log. Meanwhile the player buffers every 60s.
Any ideas why the log is missing when it’s truly transcoding but it shows up on direct play? It seems backwards. Does transcoding from HDR10 have anything to do with it?
Next I will install Tautulli maybe it has better reporting.
Tautulli doesn’t give any more info either, it shows Transcode (Speed: 0.0). Something must be broken in PMS where it doesn’t report the transcoding speed correctly.
If you have all cores at 100%, you’re going to get near 0.0 speed.
Your CPU does have Intel Quick Sync Video capability however it’s only a Haswell CPU and the QSV capability isn’t sufficient for HEVC. You have H264 only.
If you make certain DEBUG logging is on and start a playback, then download & attach those logs, I’ll show you how you can tell what’s happening.
Thanks for the info. It’s fine if it’s a CPU problem, I can just create optimized versions of these 4K movies, but that also doesn’t come free of issues with Plex on Android
Not sure why it’s so difficult to make it work well. For now my workaround is to copy the optimized versions to the tablet and play them in Kodi or VLC. If I try to play the local copies in the Plex app, they play for a few seconds and it just stops with an error. The Android Plex client doesn’t seem great at all, or maybe the problem is the Exo Player it uses.
