Wait, so you’re basically saying it’s already supported under Windows (as long as you use the app normally, rather than as a service)
That’s already not too bad! (But surprising, I thought Plex didn’t support ARC GPUs for HW transcoding)
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. 
All I can tell you is what I’m experiencing with the last couple of releases from Intel’s official Beta drivers (~2 months).
That’s great news and already adresses the matter for people not using Linux!
1 Like
its not an official thing though, its a third party app that runs Plex as a service. Too much risk there from a cybersecurity professional standpoint
1 Like
+1 for Intel Arc and AV1 support. These cards look immense
2 Likes
+1 I bought an A380 just for this purpose and it’s not working. Please support.
2 Likes
+1. Would be a great feature to havez
+1 Just installed an Arc A380 to get AV1 De/Encode and better HEVC
Support would be Greatly appreciated
For everyone interested try this build here => High bitrate EAC3 audio stutters if transcoded by Linux PMS - #51 by ChuckPa. It comes with an updated intel-media-driver.
With this one, I was able to get my A770 working under linux (ubuntu 23.04). It works really well.
+1 for fill ARC support
+1 for plexpass user here with an a380 waiting on the support for AV1 or HEVC. I’d love to be able to use in in my main 150TB Unraid server, but i can run it in windows if need be.
+1 for Intel Arc support
It seems like hw transcoding is working with my A380 on Windows (plex media server version 1.32.2.7100).
Confirming that my Arc A380 works with hardware transcoding on Ubuntu 23.04 without any additional work. Thing is a transcoding beast - did 4 simultaneous 4k HDR → 1080p SDR streams without even hitting 50% on the video encoder. Would have tested more but I ran out of screens at my home.
Have you done any testing to see how many simultaneous transcodes of 4k it can handle? I’m about to try and get this up and going on unraid with a modified kernel. Did you have to do anything to plex or is it the latest versions have the latest ffmpeg so it’s simply supported?
Can Confirm, have my ARC A750 in Windows Server 2019, Newest Beta of PMS (1.32.5.7210) and transcoding is working but i had to disable HDR Tone mapping as it was causing it to revert to non HW Transcoding.
Is this still happening? I’m looking to buy an A380 as they are only $100 right now.
1 Like
Curious about this myself. Getting ready for a fresh hypervisor build and I’d like to try and use Intel’s stuff for hardware acceleration. I’m having trouble finding any info about encoder performance on the ARC cards.
Just got done setting up a new Proxmox host and have a Ubuntu 22.04 VM running Plex inside it. I am passing through an Intel Arc 310 and so far so good. I did a test of transcoding an 85Mbps UHD remux to 1080p and 720p and the intel_gpu_top sat at 0% with the occasional flash of 30% usage for a second every 5-10 seconds. Hardware transcoding with HDR tonemapping was working fine.
The a310 only has 4GB of memory, so I don’t think I will get a ton of simultaneous transcodes out of it before hitting a memory limit. I didn’t do a multiple transcode test because it was late when I finally got it up and running, last night, and after confirming it was working I started adding my libraries. Its still scanning and doing all the analysis, so its hammering the CPU and network link to the library shares, so not a good time to do a test. This is replacing my local Plex instance, which I don’t use remote streaming for due to WAN upload limitations. I mainly use transcoding for playback to some Amazon FireTV devices in the house when there are codec decode issues, and for burning in subtitles on older DVD rips with unsupported subtitle formats. I don’t really ever need to do more than one 4k transcode at a time in the house. I have an offsite server running Channels DVR for OTA broadcasts in a better signal area, and because that has a 1Gb uplink I run Plex on there for remote use out of the house. That’s just using an Intel IGPU for there.
Since I am passing the GPU through to a Ubuntu VM from Proxmox, I can’t see a reason why running it directly on Ubuntu without a virtualization layer wouldn’t work. Just make sure to Google the most recent instructions from Intel for your OS (they had great documentation for Ubuntu 22.04) and add their repositories so you get updates from them.
The Sparkle A310 I got is a very short dual slot card with a fan on it. It spins up at boot but then shuts itself off properly when idle. I also didn’t see it spin up when transcoding, although it has a pretty good heatsink on it and mine is in a 4U server chassis with good airflow. There’s a chance after extended use it would heat up enough to turn on the fan.
In case anyone is curious about the Proxmox setup (I couldn’t find a lot of info on it), I followed the normal steps to set up VFIO / IOMMU isolation (and the necessary changes in the BIOS), but I stopped at blacklisting drivers. I was worried that, since I had an Intel IGPU plus this card, blacklisting Intel drivers was a bad idea.
I decided to take a chance, and give it a try without that, and after some trial and error came up with a combo that worked, all of the below was able to be done from the GUI except steps 1 and 2:
-
Made sure the IGPU was set as the default GPU in the BIOS so that Proxmox wouldn’t use it for output
-
Make sure resizeable BAR is disabled in the BIOS
-
Make sure the virtual machine is set up as q35 with OVMF (UEFI) BIOS
-
Set the display of the VM to none
-
Pass through the PCI devices (as ‘Raw Devices’) for both the ARC GPU and its audio device (clearly labelled in the list) and make sure the ARC GPU has ‘Primary GPU’ checked in the options, and for both, check ‘All Functions’, ‘ROM-Bar’, and ‘PCI_Express’ for both. Note that ROM-Bar is not the same as resizable BAR.
When you boot, the machine will output video over the ARC GPU, if you plug into it you’ll see its output. The downside there is that you can’t exactly control it, unless you want to go through the headache of passing through USB to the machine as well. The console in Proxmox won’t work, because there is no virtual display compatible with it, just the physical GPU.
What I did is set the machine up initially without GPU passthrough and a normal display setting, then set up XRDP and SSH, then changed over to the GPU passthrough setup.
Can’t see it mentioned here, but I’ve been using my A380 in Plex on my Unraid server for months. ARC needs kernel 6.2 or later, and Unraid doesn’t have that yet. You’ll have to add a later kernel yourself. I use the one by thor2002ro. It works great. You basically replace four files in /boot with the ones from the new kernel. The latest available is for Unraid 6.12.4, but it works for 6.12.5 too. I can’t comment on ZFS support as I don’t use that. It worked in the nov 8 kernel, but he stopped mentioning it.
Once you have the correct kernel installed you just follow a guide to use QSV. Not stricktly needed but I reccomend installing Intel GPU Top and GPU Statistics to see when it’s working.
