Server Version#: 1.18.1.1973
Player Version#: Multiple client
Hello, i have just bought a new Mac Mini 2018 (i5) and testing Plex Server with how many hardware transcoding are possible (4K Content & 1080 H264).
From Plex support page, there is a mention about limitation for encoding on MacOS limited to 1 but if i force multiple transcoding, i have hardware displayed for encoding & decoding on Tautilli:
So the Benchmark for your Mac Intel Core i5-8500B @ 3.00GHz is 12756. Based on the following information below with this score it is possible for you to play 1 4k SDR stream or roughly 5 1080p streams.
Edit to add …
Also you would get better results if your players were direct playing instead of transcoding. You will want to ensure your devices are configured for the correct speeds. Also, I use mostly Macs, IOS, and Rokus in my network and I changed most of my files from MKV to mp4 or m4v and now most of my media is direct played.
I would like to use the version feature and have a single library including 1080p & 4K version. Following the client used, sometime the fallback to 1080p version when transcoding is needed is working, but some client doesn’t back to the full hd and plex will start a transcode using the 4K version. I know the experience when 4K is used and use 4K client like Infuse or the new AppleTV player to support most of codec but for sharing, it’s not always the case and i assume hardware will manage these “unsupported” clients.
I plan to use as soon as possible the igpu for transcoding and avoid software transcoding. However, i’m thinking to use dual boot with W10 or Ubuntu to have the best hardware support & performance for multimedia.
Could you explain the MacOS limitation “macOS is only capable of hardware-accelerated encoding of 1 video at a time. This is a platform limitation from Apple.” and in which case the encoding will occur ?
I’m checking on that limitation. Can you retry your test but show me the info from Plex Web’s Dashboard instead? Also, get me the PMS logs from your test.
I haven’t been able to confirm if that limit is still applicable. Did you pause the playback for those devices? If you pause, that also pauses the transcoder so you are not running 3 instances. Keep them playing and see if you get the same result.
I get multiple flow transcoded but i’m not sure they transcode all at the same time or it transcode a file quickly then used the cache and switch to other stream
I can see two plex transcoder process with GPU used but i’m not really convince there is multiple files :
That’s why I wanted to make sure all the streams were playing previously. The transcoder can time share so it’s possible it’s just switching between the different streams real fast to avoid the 1 stream limit. Maybe try playing back something with a much higher bitrate so the transcoder doesn’t have time to switch.
Those are slow transcodes. The “speed” value is how fast a transcode is working compared to realtime. 1.0 is real-time. PGS subtitles are tough. Try to avoid those if you can, especially with 4K video.
