I have been thinking about finally jumping ship from running my server on Windows. I installed a few Linux distributions on a machine and did some preliminary testing. The results were good except for optimization which were terrible - hovering around (1x) going from 1080->720 while Windows installed on the same hardware was running around (8-9x.)
I am using hardware acceleration and have confirmed that (hw)->(hw) transcoding is working on my Intel quick sync. While a single file optimization is running, the load on the CPU is minimal I have tried Proxmox with Debian container; Ubuntu and Debian directly installed on the OS and Unraid with a docker container. All had similar disappointing results.
I installed the Plex Server on my Synology NAS and it could do around (4x). Go figure.
Is this just one of things Windows does better? Being a Linux noob, I have no idea where to begin to troubleshoot this issue. Any guidance would be appreciated.
I ran a plex server nearly identical to yours (Lenovo TS140) for years and while I don’t have any notes from the time, I don’t recall seeing any difference from windows to linux in optimize. As far as I know optimize always runs via software (no hw assist) to get the smallest best quality possible, and allow you to specify quality.
is it possible your new files are HEVC and your old were 264? or perhaps you had the transcoder quality setting different in windows than in linux?
Thanks for the reply. I tested with the same video file (H264) and the same transcoder settings. I just tested an Unraid/docker set up on that machine with “Use hardware acceleration when available” turned off and it ran around (8x) @ 75% CPU utilization. So, it looks like the Optimize process can use hardware acceleration.
Yup I was wrong on that. optimize does indeed use hw assist. (at least on Synology (linux) OS) I saw a drop in CPU usage from 85% (i5-9600K) to 10%, so it is indeed being used. funny, but my optimize (optimize for mobile) ran at approx the same rate (about 8 minutes about 12x) using hw or sw optimization. that was unexpected, I thought I would see a difference in the rate. but that being said, the CPU drop proved it was using quicksync.
