Need Help with HW Transcoding on a QNAP TS-453Be

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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1

Server Version#: 1.16.6.1592 Running on QNAP TS-453Be
Player Version#: N/A
I need some help to set/insure that HW transcoding is enabled for converting DVR TV shows. When I installed the Plex server a few weeks ago DVR shows transcoded immediately. Now they are taking 15-30 minutes or more to transcode after the show has ended. The server CPU is peaking at around 95% the whole time.

I also seem to not be able to access the server settings from the web. All I see is the web client and general.

2

What QTS are you using on that? 4.3.6?
There’s a lot of good things in The QNAP FAQ, but your workflow could be
something like this. Hop on your desktop or laptop and make sure there are
no open windows or tabs to a Plex player.

Then use your default browser to go to Plex.tv and sign in. After that,
in the upper right corner of the website, the Sign In will change to
Launch. Go ahead and hit that to launch the web client in your default web
browser. Don’t use blockers or Noscript on Plex’s website.

Once the Plex player client is launched, answer any questions it gives you,
then give it a minute or two to stabilize, then in the upper right hand corner
click your Account and now Sign Out.

You should now be brought back to a sign in screen. Close that tab.
We’re done with plex.tv.

Now open up a web browser tab to your QNAP, and log in as admin.
Click your Main Menu and choose Plex Media Server. It will open up
a new browser tab and that’s how you get back into your QNAP PMS directly.

Did it work?

3

Thanks for the fast response.

MY QTS is 4.3.6:1050
My Plex version is 1.16.6.1592-b9d49bdb7
Web Client is 3.108.2

Doing all the above still gets me to the same screen for settings. Perhaps the app has changed but when I select Settings I get to a screen that states " Web Client—General". I see no options for the four types of settings including server.

Anyway I have attached the image from that screen that shows the transcoder settings.

plex
plex832×601 110 KB

4

The settings that you reached and pictured in your post are the right settings.

You can see from them that you are connected to a server, because you can see in the left column it lists your PMS named CouperPlex

When it lists a server like that, the Settings page will have two General sections on the left side. The top General is for the web client. And the bottom General is for your Server. Pretty much anything below the name CouperPlex is all server stuff.

So you managed also to select the transcoder tab for your PMS. Awesome sauce.
You’ve shown you have Use HW accel when available checked. Ditto.

Now let’s force some of that to happen to be sure it’s working.

  • Start PMP, or the Plex player app
  • Enter full screen mode.
  • Play a 1080p video
  • While it’s playing, along the bottom right menu click the Settings icon
  • From the Playback Settings overlay that slid up, notice where it says

Quality Original (10Mbps 1080p HD) :arrow_down_small:

  • Click the words left of the down arrow to choose another smaller size to watch.
  • Select 480p from the drop down list. You will certainly force HW transcode if possible.
  • While it’s playing at 480p, go back to the web client and use the Dashboard
  • on the Dashboard at the top, expand the details by clicking the upper right icon.
  • You can see that details icon in my picture below.
  • It’s doing hardware acceleration if it says hw

go
go961×420 102 KB

In my case it’s doing both hw decoding of the h264 video, and doing hw encoding of the SD h264 video, which is why hw is listed twice.

Any luck? :smiley:

5

Again thanks for the quick response.

With your excellent instructions I have confirmed it’s doing HW transcoding during playback. The original content used almost no CPU. During transcoding to 480 it used about 20% of the CPU but it still said HW transcoding on the dashboard.

So maybe I have misrepresented my question. My real issue is what I think is transcoding during recording. My problem is that when I DVR something now I have to wait 30 minutes or so for a 1 hour program to finish what I think is the default transcoding before I can watch it. In the Recordings you can see that the TV show is finished but the red icon still shows it’s being recorded and the CPU is pegged.

Is there a scenario like you gave me above for playback that I can use to test what is going on during this original DVR recording to insure it doing it via HW?

6

I don’t know anything about those live tv or dvr aspects of Plex.
I’m fairly sure the transcoder, if it ever runs, will use hw if it can.
Maybe edit your OP to add tags for those and hope someone joins.

7

Added live tv-DVR.

Thanks for the help

8

yw, while you have time, there’s a lot of articles on Subtitles on the plex website.
They make things complicated and need to be addressed.

9

Well this is real weird. After our experiments today I recorded an two hour long show but stopped it about 1:40 in. Immediately the video was available to play.

I have no idea why it is working now. I will monitor it and post back here if the symptoms return.

10

A bit more information as to my issue and more work I have to do:
The transcoding issue occurred again last night. Again a 2 hour program that took an additional half hour to finish transcoding of the original content. Early in the evening other shows finished immediately.

But here is what I discovered:

  • The problem show was broadcast in 1080i. When transcoding is finished the file shows it as being 1080P.
  • This recording had the system CPU at 90%+ and the Plex portion at 85%+
  • The shows that transcoded immediately were broadcast at 720P.
  • These shows had the CPU around 60% and the Plex portion around 50%

I am not sure what I can do to have Plex not transcode to progressive from interlaced, or if that is even an option. I also think that the 1080 transcoding just gets further and further behind so when the show ends it takes a while to complete. The 720P shows are available immediately.

11

excellent job identifying the variables.

PMP has the ability to toggle Deinterlace for its output to your screen,
probably in TV Mode Settings.

I’m sorry but I don’t have any useful knowledge of Plex and DVR.
Haven’t spotted much insight as I’ve read threads here.

We both could use a modern Core i5 QNAP that does all this properly.
That being said, maybe you can find your show rebroadcast on an
affiliate network in 720p. I may end up running PMS on my iMac
and letting QNAP serve files.

12

And further updates:

  • Turns out the transcoding option for my DVR files when saved is not in the normal Transcoding menu but in the LiveTV/DVR section, in Device Settings for the device (HDHomeRun in my case). The option is Convert Video While Recording. If you leave it Off then no transcoding occurs during recording. Choose Transcoding and it will do it while recording
  • Almost no CPU is used by Plex during the recording with Transcode Off
  • I don’t believe Plex is currently using HW Transcoding while recording but I am not 100% sure. The option to transcode during recording says its Experimental
  • If transcoding is set to Off then 1080i programs are saved as MPEG 2, interlaced and are transcoded during playback. Bit rates are 50% of the 1080p transcoded playback
  • If transcoding is set to Transcode then Plex transcodes 1080i to H264 and progressive (1080p) while recording. Again I don’t think this is using HW transcoding hence the long lag times after the show has been recorded before it’s available to play back
  • Watching Live TV with Transcoding Off uses only about 5% of the CPU for Plex
  • If you rewind the live playback the Plex CPU goes up to about 60%, but only briefly. Kind of confusing.

So to summarize it’s the device setting that tells Plex to transcode DVR files when they are being recorded. The Transcoding settings deal only with playbay of ALL media, including DVR content that may need to be transcoded depending on the recording and player.

13

Let’s get some log files in debug mode, and we’ll see whether hw acceleration is being invoked during record+transcode.

Nice job on sorting out the issue.

14

OK. I recorded something with the device transcoding on. Which log file do I attach?

15

Please attach the ZIP file. It’s impossible to predict which of the 6 PMS logs it will be in.

16

The recording (days of our lives) ended at 2:03.
Plex Media Server Logs_2019-09-19_17-20-12.zip (3.7 MB)

17

I do not see any transcoder errors in your logs.

What I do see is a lot of junk (almost filling your logs) coming from two devices advertising themselves as UPNP devices but not providing XML as one should.

Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.615 [0x7fcb41aa2700] DEBUG - NetworkServiceBrowser: Parsing SSDP schema for http://192.168.1.100:49152/upnpdevicedesc.xml
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.616 [0x7fcb41aa2700] DEBUG - HTTP requesting GET http://192.168.1.100:49152/upnpdevicedesc.xml
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.623 [0x7fcb41aa2700] DEBUG - HTTP 200 response from GET http://192.168.1.100:49152/upnpdevicedesc.xml
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.623 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML: Entity: line 1:\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.623 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML: parser\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.623 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML: error :\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.623 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML: Unsupported encoding gbk\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.623 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="gbk"?>\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.623 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML:                                   ^\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.623 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - Error parsing content.
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.623 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - Error parsing XML: Error parsing file.
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:51.623 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - SSDP: Error parsing device schema for http://192.168.1.100:49152/upnpdevicedesc.xml
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.221 [0x7fcb41aa2700] DEBUG - NetworkServiceBrowser: Parsing SSDP schema for http://192.168.1.111:49152/upnpdevicedesc.xml
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.221 [0x7fcb41aa2700] DEBUG - HTTP requesting GET http://192.168.1.111:49152/upnpdevicedesc.xml
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.241 [0x7fcb41aa2700] DEBUG - HTTP 200 response from GET http://192.168.1.111:49152/upnpdevicedesc.xml
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.241 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML: Entity: line 1:\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.241 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML: parser\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.241 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML: error :\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.241 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML: Unsupported encoding gbk\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.241 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="gbk"?>\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.241 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - XML:                                   ^\00
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.241 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - Error parsing content.
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.241 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - Error parsing XML: Error parsing file.
Sep 19, 2019 16:57:52.241 [0x7fcb41aa2700] ERROR - SSDP: Error parsing device schema for http://192.168.1.111:49152/upnpdevicedesc.xml

I am not familiar with DVR/LiveTV in any way. I live in the country with satellite service only which isn’t usable in Plex.

18

Beautiful. Thanks for the nice logs. You asked in your OP,

and here what I saw because I’m not the best at searching xD

./Plex Transcoder Statistics.log:5:<Variant id="1b28c575-11d4-40dc-bd87-dc444d497263" context="static" videoDecision="copy" audioDecision="copy" protocol="hls" container="mpegts" videoCodec="*" audioCodec="*" audioChannels="2" transcodeHwRequested="1" transcodeHwFullPipeline="0">

./Plex Transcoder Statistics.3.log:5:<Variant id="6b922697-457f-479d-98f1-af38f09214c5" targetBitrate="10000000" context="streaming" sourceVideoCodec="mpeg2video" sourceAudioCodec="ac3" videoDecision="copy" audioDecision="copy" protocol="http" container="mkv" videoCodec="*" audioCodec="*" audioChannels="6" transcodeHwRequested="1" transcodeHwFullPipeline="1">

Both instances of transcoder entires, one for streaming and one for static,
say that transcodeHwRequested="1"

but I don’t know what transcodeHwFullPipeline="0" vs "1" means.
Anyone?

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