@jpirotte said:
Has anyone on this thread tried the new hw transcoding preview? I posted some feedback on there but wondering if anyone else tried it specifically on Synology. While the new preview shows mpeg2video (hw) to h264 (hw), I find I have the same buffering/cpu as mpeg2 to h264(hw). It almost seems like while it says it’s doing hw → hw it may not be as there does not seem to be any difference in performance (whether it be good vs bad, quality or speed)
If I may?
Patience please? You saw/are seeing the preview, a.k.a a work in progress.
Please don’t think I was being impatient. I was just curious if anyone else was seeing the same on Synology.
My apologies. We all want it so badly and some need it so badly that anxious and impatient are sometimes hard to discern from the prose used
I may be a bit slow on the uptake here, but from a practical standpoint, can someone distill down what settings I should be placing on my Synology DS918+ running Plex Media Server? Looking through this thread with much of the back and forth I just want to verify I understood how to apply this info correctly. Thanks!
On my Plex PMS Transcoder setup I have the following:
Transcoder Quality: Automatic
Background transcoding x264 preset: Faster
Use hardware acceleration where available: yes (should this be unchecked for now?)
And on my HDHomeRun Prime (under DVR Settings in Plex Media Server):
Convert Video While Recording: Transcode
@AirBeagle1 said:
I may be a bit slow on the uptake here, but from a practical standpoint, can someone distill down what settings I should be placing on my Synology DS918+ running Plex Media Server? Looking through this thread with much of the back and forth I just want to verify I understood how to apply this info correctly. Thanks!
On my Plex PMS Transcoder setup I have the following:
Transcoder Quality: Automatic
Background transcoding x264 preset: Faster
Use hardware acceleration where available: yes (should this be unchecked for now?)
And on my HDHomeRun Prime (under DVR Settings in Plex Media Server):
Convert Video While Recording: Transcode
This is what has worked fairly well for me (very little buffering, limited to 1 stream) on my DS916+:
transcoder quality: prefer higher speed encoding
Background transcoding: Slow (this should be ok with any setting as it’s not for real time transcoding)
use hardware acceleration when available: No
The only reason I chose no hw acceleration is because it helps for h264 but makes it worst for live TV/DVR’d shows for now. But if you’re only viewing h264, it may work well for you.
If I may augment?
The initial offering of Hardware Transcoding is limited to H.264 and H.265 (HEVC).
I can tell you this is expanding to include more.
Thanks Chuck. My translation – in the future Plex will be able to hardware transcode MPEG2, at which time it would make sense for me to switch the “use hardware acceleration when available” setting back to “yes,” correct?
@AirBeagle1 MPEG2 HW transcoding is coming. Once it’s finished, most likely that will be a good time to turn the Hardware Acceleration option on. As of right now, I use settings exactly like @jpirotte on my DS916+ and it works well, as long as you limit live TV viewing to no more than one stream at a time. In addition I have my recorded programs go into their own library, and that library is set to Optimize for TV.
@silence21 said: In addition I have my recorded programs go into their own library, and that library is set to Optimize for TV.
@silence21 Sounds great, thank you. May I ask how you set a library to optimize for a specific destination? I have my DVR’d TV shows and DVR’d movies go into separate folders/libraries, but understanding how to have them automatically optimize would probably eliminate 90% of my frustrations. Thanks!
Oops – no need to respond, I figured it out. 
Thank you.
I’m glad you figured it out, @AirBeagle1 , once you have those settings, the DS916 is pretty solid little DVR!
