I am currently running Plex Media Server (PMS) version 1.40.3.8502 on a Windows Server 2022 machine, equipped with an NVIDIA A2000 GPU. Both the Transcoder quality and Hardware transcoding device settings are set to Automatic.
When I try to play media through a web browser, I encounter significant issues. Specifically, when I select any option other than Convert (Maximum), the playback almost never works, and the screen remains black.
However, when I use the Plex client, everything works smoothly, and playback starts almost immediately.
Is there anything I can change or configure to improve web browser playback performance?
Browser clients tend not to have good video compatibility, especially newer codecs (x265 or AV1), and especially not 4K videos and their HDR formats. So a browser playback likely results in a transcode. Could you let us know if all of the videos you are attempting to play are of these formats? This’d let me know if we need to look at your server’s transcoding capabilities (hardware transcoding might not be enabled, for example) or somewhere else.
One big help would be to capture the server logs immediately after attempting to play a video. Make sure Verbose is off, you shouldn’t ever need that level of logging. I don’t know how to interpret logs, but if you present them here someone else might be able to examine and find out what is happening.
It’s really amazing. After turning it off and then turning hardware acceleration back on, it still works. Does this mean that I just need to turn off and then turn on hardware encoding again? I don’t understand what exactly happened. And now that there are no issues, I can’t reproduce the previous problem anymore.
Strange. I’d imagine turning transcoding off would not fix much. Perhaps Plex was stuck attempting to transcode, but it wasn’t able to find your transcoder driver. Turning it off and on again probably fixed it.
