Playing mkv from any client causes immediate crash - likely a h.265 issue

Plex Media Server
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1

Server Version#: 1.21.3.4021
Player Version#: Web - 4.52.1, Firestick - latest

As the title suggests, I think my issues are boiling down to mkv h.265 files.

I have a firestick attached to my samsung TV, but I’m also seeing the same behavior when using the web player from my laptop.
Each time I try and play one of these files, within 5-10 seconds an error will come up saying something went wrong and the plex server will completely crash.
I currently have the plex service running, so I can see it stop, then countdown for a 10 second pause prior to starting back up. I have closed the service and just ran plex as the logged in user but that didn’t seem to change anything. I had seen a few posts about plex running as a service possibly having issues using quicksync decoding, so I figured it was worth a shot.

When I look at some of the logs, specifically the server log it seems to only contain info after plex started back up again after the crash, nothing prior to that.
If I watch the console output I can see some errors come up but since plex crashes right away that is hard to glean any info from before it blinks out.

I used to have plex running on a VM, and at least the 1080 mkv h.265 files seem to play fine. About 4 months ago I migrated everything over to a fresh W10 optiplex 7060 machine. Haven’t really tried playing anything h.265 since the conversion so I’m just discovering this now.

I had searched the forums for topics on playing 265 format files, and I saw some posts of about the machines sometimes not being powerful enough to transcode. But nothing saying nothing 265 will play. So I’m guessing this is an issue just with my setup.

Any ideas on this?

Plex Media Server Logs_2021-02-12_09-52-52.zip (1.8 MB)

2

Looks like you’ve enabled hardware transcoding but it’s not working for your GPU so it’s reverted to using Windows Media Foundation and that appears to be what’s causing the crash. Turn off hardware encoding and see if that help.

3

I’ll give that a try.
But shouldn’t Plex be able to use the Intel video GPU for hardware transcoding? Maybe a driver if issue if it can’t?

4

Yes, it should and it’s trying, but it’s failing. To be clear, I believe it’s the media foundations drivers that are causing the crash when initializing. You can try reinstalling media foundations to see if that helps. Do you also have the option to enable HDR tone mapping? If so, you can just try turning that off first. Some systems don’t support that for hardware.

5

I started with the tone mapping option, and without that enabled I am able to start and play some of the mkv files. The one couldn’t play is about 18GB so maybe I didn’t wait long enough for the transcoder to do it’s thing. But another file that was around 6GB I think started playing.
Although you mentioned media foundations, would the driver of the Intel 630 chipset be in question? mine is at 27.20.100.8853 right now.

With hardware option enabled though, when watching taskman, should I be seeing an initial topping out of the transcoding process then the GPU portion ramps up?
When I tried playing one of the other mkv files I saw the CPU top out but the GPU was sitting around 1-5%.

6

I found the foundation codecs for HVEC and installed them. Any others I should aim for or if HVEC is the only issue then just roll with that one?