Optimised version settings (hardware acceleration)

General Discussions
1

So Plex is now beginning to support hardware accelerated transcoding (platform dependent) which is definitely a good thing. It allows my server to stream without buffering in pretty much all circumstances. If I turn it off my server is a different creature with judders and buffering pretty much the whole time. However, on occasions the hardware acceleration goes awry with blocky artifacts in fast moving sequences. I can overcome both these problems by creating an optimised version while I disable hardware acceleration. However I don’t really want hardware acceleration turned off all the time because if I then want to transcode something on the fly I need it on to stop the buffering.

What I would like is an option in the optimised version settings to say “don’t use hardware acceleration for this optimised version”. This would sort out all my problems in one go. I could have optimised versions generated beautifully using no hardware acceleration and simultaneously stream smoothly when I needed to transcode on the fly. Would this be possible? Or is there already a way of achieving this?

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2

Or Plex get the hardware accelerated transcoding working properly?!

Methinks that would be a helluva lot easier for all?

3

Yes that works too. However that is a complex issue between the hardware vendor and the Plex Devs. I am assuming since the hardware acceleration is buggy on most platforms this is not an easy fix. So I am suggesting a touch more control over when to use the hardware acceleration so that the user can effectively say, “I know hardware acceleration can do this and this but not that, so only use the acceleration when I know it works.”

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