Plex Hardware Transcoding Not Working For Me - Am I Missing Something Simple?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Just wondering if anyone has a guess as to why I cant get plex hardware transcoding working? First off, I am led to believe it is not working because watching OpenHardware monitor reveals my GPU is working at 0% while im am streaming a transcoded video to my phone, and looking at the PLEX logs reveals that h/w encoding failed to start too:

Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.107 [7688] DEBUG - We’re going to try to auto-select an audio stream for account 1.
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.107 [7688] DEBUG - Selecting best audio stream for part ID 43384 (autoselect: 0 language: en)
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.107 [7688] DEBUG - Audio Stream: 76900, Subtitle Stream: -1
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.107 [7688] DEBUG - We’re going to try to auto-select an audio stream for account 1.
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.107 [7688] DEBUG - Selecting best audio stream for part ID 42438 (autoselect: 0 language: en)
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.107 [7688] DEBUG - Audio Stream: 74792, Subtitle Stream: -1
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.122 [7688] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Applying codec restriction restrict-transcode-target-codec(audioCodec=aac&context=streaming&protocol=hls&type=videoProfile&videoCodec=h264) on b9d3bd58dcfd9e72-com-plexapp-android
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.123 [7688] DEBUG - Codecs: testing h264_nvenc (encoder)
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.123 [7688] ERROR - [FFMPEG] - Cannot load nvcuda.dll
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.123 [7688] WARN - avcodec_open2 returned -1313558101 for encoder ‘h264_nvenc’
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.123 [7688] DEBUG - Codecs: testing h264_mf (encoder)
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.142 [7688] ERROR - [FFMPEG] - could not create MFT
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.142 [7688] WARN - avcodec_open2 returned -40 for encoder ‘h264_mf’
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.143 [7688] DEBUG - Codecs: hardware transcoding: testing API dxva2
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.143 [7688] ERROR - [FFMPEG] - Failed to create Direct3D device
Nov 02, 2017 10:50:19.143 [7688] DEBUG - Codecs: hardware transcoding: opening hw device failed - probably not supported by this system, error: Unknown error occurred

The PC I run Plex on has the following specs/configuration:

  • Windows 7 x64
  • AMD Radeon 280 GPU (w/ AMD-recommended driver v 17.7.2 installed - also tried 17.10.3 which AMD considers the ‘optional’ driver for my card but had same issue described above) - specifically the card is a ‘XFX Double D R9-280A-TDFD Radeon R9 280 3GB 384-Bit’
  • AMD Phenom II X4 965 CPU @ 3.4 GHz
  • 8 Gb RAM
  • Nothing overclocked or otherwise tinkered with
  • Latest version of Plex (1.9.6.4401)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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All,

I discovered what was going on and wanted to share in any case anyone else was having this sort of trouble. It turns out that I wasnt able to take advantage of the GPU because I was running Plex as a service (using NSSM). Apparently tasks running as windows service dont have access to certain (or maybe all) features of the GPU. When I stopped my service and started plex the normal (Desktop) way, hardware acceleration was indeed working. If anyone knows of a workaround to make hardware acceleration work whilst running Plex as a Windows Service please let me know. At least I feel better somewhat understanding what is going on for the time being…

Thanks!

3

I was having trouble with transcoding, direct play after I did a reinstall of win 7 ult 64 bit. h.264 would not play properly, stuttering same 3 sec video with audio continuing. I was at my wits end, my media server/file server is a little long in the tooth being amd phenom 2 based 1055t processor. It turns out that when I reinstalled pms, hardware transcoding was on, once I turned it off and removed the codecs from the folder… reboot… voila. back to normal. hope this helps
p.s. maybe it was upgrading from monthly to lifetime that helped? lol

1 Like
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Hello. I was having the exact same problem. Transcoder broken on my w7 64 bit Server since the update at the end of Feb 2018. I read this thread and turned off the use hardware option. That seems to have fixed it. Hallelujah! You also mention remeoving codecs from the folder and rebooting. What folder is that and is it something I need to do ? Thanks a million !