Why is Plex Transcoding Live TV on a HDHomeRun Extend that Has Native Transcoding?! It’s eating up my NAS’s resources! I am at 70-90% CPU.
The Channels DVR package for my NAS works exceedingly better with no transcoding and used like 10% of my old 218play NAS cpu resources. Now I have a beefier 218+ with Intel Quick Sync and Plex transcoder is taking 70% of cpu resources and the video is constantly buffering.
Its transcoding H264 to H264?! And then on top of that its transcoding AC3 to EAC3 when the Apple TV supports AC3 natively?!
InstaTV app on Apple TV has no problem letting HDHomeRun Extend do the transcoding and channels appear instantly and no buffer. Channels app is the same. Why is the Plex server transcoding for codecs that work natively on Apple TV?
HDHomeRun devs are extremely willing to help developers with using there API so I don’t understand why Plex wouldn’t implement something so important. Plex is basically neutering both a NAS and Tuner. And Plex does know to distinguish between tuners with or without transcoders because your support page explicitly states the Extend transcodes on its own and thats what the “Highest Quality” and other settings that are setup for the Extend in Plex are for.
Plex only supports 3 brands of tuners. With only about 12-15 models total. This is hardly difficult to manage to get supported fully.
For comparison, look at how many different NASes alone Plex supports. Theirs literally hundreds or more.
Please, can we get this feature? I cannot use Plex for Live TV without it. And I paid extra for the Extend because it transcodes and leaves my other devices resources free.
My Plex server is an old Athlon 64 X2 4600+ processor. I specifically bought an HDHomeRun Extend so it can handle the video transcoding, but it looks like it’s transcoding h.264 to h.264 as well, using up 170% of my dual-core processor resources. I am unable to use it.
I understand I am most likely always going to have to transcode audio for one reason or another, but transcoding audio typically uses 10-15% of my CPU when playing local files.
Without knowing more information about what setting you are using on the Extend I am going to assume you are using the Highest Quality which transcodes to h264 but leaves the frames untouched so a 1080i video is passed to your Plex Server. If the Client device can’t handle the interlaced content the Plex Server must transcode. Try setting your Extend to High Quality which will force a transcode on the Extend to progressive instead of interlaced but that settings converts the video to 720p.
It is currently set to “High Quality (30fps limit)”, but its still transcoding at the Plex server (both Plex Web and on my Roku) with my CPU usage at around 130%.
Should the settings on the actual Extend be something else? Right now, its set to “heavy”
So the Roku Plex app itself had a cap on the bitrate it would handle for local servers, at 8Mbps. I overrode it to “Original”, which may or may not be a bad idea, and suddenly, Plex was Direct Streaming both audio and video. No transcoding.
So the transcoding was actually lowering the bitrate to what the Roku was requesting. Now I’ve got nearly zero CPU usage while watching Live TV.
OK… so is it the case that PLEX will accept an H.264 stream from the Extend if it’s configured to transcode it’s recordings? I’m running a Quattro now and find the CPU overhead of the during-recording transcode to be too much… especially since it winds up storing the un-transcoded .TS file. :neutral:
I would switch to an Extend… well, TWO Extends, if I knew I could benefit from smaller recording files without the useless CPU overhead. Is this true?
@btaroli what client devices are you using to watch Live TV or recordings with Plex? The client device determines what it can handle. As @tendonut above mentioned once he switched the client device to original quality his Plex Server CPU utilization decreased because the Plex Server was no longer needing to transcode the incoming video/audio streams to what the client device was saying it could handle. I use a Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, and a Nvidia Shield 16GB as my Plex clients and can Direct Play/Stream anything I want to watch inside my home. My son also has a Fire TV Stick and he can Direct Play/Stream anything he watches from my Plex Server. So my server has almost no CPU processor utilization to transcode streams we are watching.
I use a variety of clients… web, apple tv, phones, whatever I feel like. That’s the point, right?
The issue is that the MPEG-2 transcoding options aren’t ideal. During-recording transcoding would be ideal, but the overhead is very high and, at least in my case, it results still in full-size .TS files. There is an option to run a post-recording script, and I wouldn’t mind trying that. Haven’t found many examples in here though.
I have found some other threads with excellent information on the use of the Extend to /work around/ this issue, but it comes with it’s own sacrifices. It offers hardware transcode, but the only workable option reduces image size and bitrate, causing other quality problems.
I’m glad to have stumbled upon this thread. Learning from your trial and error helped me out tremendously. I’ll share my situation to help out those that are interested in helping themselves.
Setup:
Linux Plex Server
HDHomerun Extend (set to high quality transcode on Plex config)
Roku Ultra
The Homerun Extend was specifically purchased for its transcoding to aliveiate the Plex server from Live TV duties. The same situation described above was encountered; H264 to H264 transcoding on the Plex server causing high CPU utilization.
In conclusion, the most important detail with the Live TV setup and a Homerun Extend setup is to ensure the client is configured correctly.
On Plex App:
Settings > Video > Local Servers > Original
After this detail was configured, I can report direct video and audio streams from the Homerun Extend to the Roku Ultra.
Huge success for this project! Thank you all for guiding me in the right direction. Hopefully others benefit from this cool feature as well.
