hello i got a Quadro P400 card for my server for only media transcoding but when i look at the status of the playback i only see its not using hardware for the encode (see screenshot)
is this because i don’t have a monitor connected to the gpu or the GPU itself?
tested with multiple file types and codecs.
hope someone has an idea
Server Specs:
CPU:Intel Xeon E5-2630l 6 Core 12 Theads(6 Theads for Windows server 2016 VM with plex server)
Mem: 42GB DDR3 ECC (8GB for Windows server 2016 VM with plex server)
GPU: Nvidia Quardo P400 (PCIE passthru to Windows server 2016 VM with plex server)
Storage: 2 120GB SSD’s in raid 1 for main VM storage
3 1TB HDD’s in a ZFS pool for backups
4 3TB HDD’s in a ZFS pool for plex media
It’s not clear what you mean -
That “(hw)” in your image means Plex is using hardware acceleration for whatever it needs to do.
I’m assuming he’s wondering why it’s not doing hardware decoding. If it was, he’d be seeing “Video: Transcoding H264 (hw) to H264 (hw)”.
@“Cafe Diem” said:
I’m assuming he’s wondering why it’s not doing hardware decoding. If it was, he’d be seeing “Video: Transcoding H264 (hw) to H264 (hw)”.
@Expansion – if that’s what you expect to see you’re mistaken. this information shows how a certain element of the movie is played back. In your case…
- the video is transcoded from h264 to (lower bitrate?) h264 using the hardware transcoder
- the audio stream is used as is… the “direct stream” indicates Plex needs to put all the streams into a different container for the client to play it.
so the information you see is only the “from → to”, not how Plex is decoding/encoding things in particular.
Expansion,
I had this exact problem. Without a monitor connected hardware decode wouldn’t work. On amazon search for a “headless hdmi” adapter they are about 10 US dollars. It will trick your graphics card into thinking u have a monitor hooked up. This enabled nvidia hardware decode to become available to plex. I also used some utility that showed that hardware decode only became available to windows 10 with a monitor attached.
@tom80H said:
@“Cafe Diem” said:
I’m assuming he’s wondering why it’s not doing hardware decoding. If it was, he’d be seeing “Video: Transcoding H264 (hw) to H264 (hw)”.
@Expansion – if that’s what you expect to see you’re mistaken.
so the information you see is only the “from → to”, not how Plex is decoding/encoding things in particular.
You’re mistaken. It shows “Video: Transcoding H264 (hw) to H264 (hw)” on my server when properly using hardware decode/encode. If you’re only seeing one “(hw)”, you’re not getting hardware acceleration at both ends. Heck, Plex themselves literally show this in their screenshot on their hardware acceleration article:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/
I second the idea that @Expansion should make sure he’s not running a headless server. I’m not sure hardware encoding works in a headless setup, but it’s a simple starting point.
1 Like
@“Cafe Diem” said:
Heck, Plex themselves literally show this in their screenshot on their hardware acceleration article:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/
thanks for pointing this out… I stand corrected :S
im going to try tomorrow if hooking up a monitor works.
and i know its not decoding because if i try to watch a HEVC movie the cpu is pegged and GPU is at very low usage.
@“Cafe Diem” how do i make sure im not running headless?
@Expansion said:
im going to try tomorrow if hooking up a monitor works.
and i know its not decoding because if i try to watch a HEVC movie the cpu is pegged and GPU is at very low usage.
@“Cafe Diem” how do i make sure im not running headless?
The key to making sure it’s not running headless is making sure that the monitor is plugged into the primary video card (likely your onboard Intel), and I’m not 100% sure, but I believe it’s best to have it plugged in during the boot process. You’ll want to keep it attached, including when you log in to the account where Plex runs. (BTW, if you’re running Plex-as-a-service, it has issues with hw acceleration, I believe).
If you do this, and suddenly encode/decode both work, consider buying a dummy HDMI plug from Amazon. It will fool the video card into thinking a monitor is attached at all times.
i think i got it to work it now it now plays HEVC with only 30% cpu load.
i used a HDMI to VGA adapter as a dummy and set it up so it mirrors the VM monitor and that did the trick.
and no im not running it from a service because my media library is on a SMB share.
i noticed some issues when converting a file in the background and playing at the same time but in general i can watch 2 high quality videos at the same time now.
@Expansion said:
and no im not running it from a service because my media library is on a SMB share.
I’d like to point out that it is indeed possible to both
run PMS as a system service
and
have the media on a network share.
To make this work you need to:
- don’t run the plex service under the
SYSTEM account, but create a regular, restricted windows user for it. Give this user account the very same username and password as your NAS requires for access to the files.
- add the locations of your media files as ‘UNC paths’: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1291830#Comment_1291830
(but of course running it as a system service has the above mentioned restriction, that only hardware encoding is possible)
