I am also having this issue on plex 1.18.6.2368. I have an intel i5-9600k processor with UHD Graphics 630. I am on version 26.20.100.7262 and don’t see a way to get higher on the gigabyte (motherboard) site. If I directly download the update from intel it says that the version is not supported and I should contact the motherboard manufacturer.
Is my only option to wait until gigabyte releases an update with 7755?
Is this issue limited to using Intel H/W decoding or does it include Nvidia H/W decoding as well?
I’ve been experiencing frequent crashes since “upgrading” to 1.18 but I can’t downgrade due to
In keeping with this thread Transcoder crashing / not using HW acceleration on Windows running as a server - with WORKAROUND for RDP I also access my headless server using RDP
Have not seen nvidia related crashes for a long time. Last time was in 2018
I have not been able to find any crash reports uploaded for your account,
I notice one of your servers is on PMS version 1.18.2 which was before a server fix for one of the hardware acceleration crashes. The fix came in 1.18.4
So I suggest you update to latest beta, ensure debug logging enabled on the server and crash reporting and on next crash get the server logs after restarts and look for any recent dmp files in the crash reports subdirectory for the version of PMS
The installation that’s on version 1.18.4.2171 demonstrates the issue, the other installation (1.18.2) isn’t used as often. I believe you won’t have those crash reports as the entire PC blue screens and reboots in most cases.
I’ve been using the fix as described in the thread above i.e. not RDP’ing to the server and incredibly I’ve had no crashes since. I will continue with version 1.18.4 for a week just to confirm that it is actually a fix before deviating as advised.
Same issue here. Server crashes when tries to HW transcode a file.
GPU is Intel® HD Graphics 620 driver version 26.20.100.7262
Logs attached.
Thank you - this is an outstanding issue when running as Service or Scheduled task or RDP
I’ve just updated to driver version 26.20.100.7755 and it works like charm.
Were you / are you running Plex Media Server as a Service or Scheduled Task or through RDP? As far as I was aware this still still crashes
I’m using an Intel NUC running windows 10 with the regular plex media server app.
I don’t know if that is as service, or scheduled task. No idea what RDP is.
When you say running through RDP, what does that entail? Launching the service physically through an RDP session as opposed to through a local KVM?
Seeing the same issues on:
Server: 1.18.7.2438
Intel: 26.20.100.7262
Gigabyte doesn’t have an update, so I’m stuck and disabling hardware transcoding doesn’t seem like the correct option.
rdp = remote desktop, often used for ‘headless’ servers.
plex hw transcoding doesn’t work properly when RDP is involved.
plug a monitor in, use a physically attached keyboard, then see if it works.
if it does, buy an hdmi/displayport dummy plug, and use a different remote desktop program, like vnc etc.
Just to be clear, does this mean playing through RDP or physically launching the service? I manage my machine through RDP but playback is always through other devices (iOS / Apple TV). So does the invocation of the executable matter in that when it’s run through RDP it’s sandboxed differently or something?
it means starting/logging in to your server remotely via RDP affects how the video card is initialized within windows and causes problems with plex hw transcoding.
if you search the forum for windows rdp transcoding, you can see this is a long ongoing problem.
Thanks for the clarification, had no concept of that. Seems to be working fine now w/ a VNC launch. Is there any other way to headlessly launch the service programtically without running into this? Could I write a wrapper that launches the service from a different binary that would initialize in the same way?
i think the simplest way is to configure your windows box to auto-login to a dedicated plex user, then PMS should start automatically (if enabled).
I don’t know if it still works and/or is still supported, but there is a thread that has a utility to ‘run plex as service’, although I’ve never used it, and I don’t think that works with plex hw gpu either.
if your running a headless box, your better off with linux/ubuntu/debian (although you may still need a dummy plug if no monitor is connected).
Starting Plex as a Service has the same effect, HW transcoding doesn’t initialize. There is a paid utility that will start Plex https://www.coretechnologies.com/products/AlwaysUp/ without using service level 0.
I am unable to get it to work w/ AlwaysUp as well, do you have specific configuration you need to enable to get that to work?
From the tools menu, use the Auto Login and auto launch feature.
this is pretty interesting, and seems to indicate why running a service complicates things.
tldr, windows isolates services from user applications, services are ‘non-interactive’.
quote
Because Session 0 is no longer a user session, services that are running in Session 0 do not have access to the video driver. This means that any attempt that a service makes to render graphics fails. Querying the display resolution and color depth in Session 0 reports the correct results for the system up to a maximum of 1920x1200 at 32 bits per pixel
