Plex Media Server not utilizing GPU

Plex Media Server
,
17

Supplemental: (I forgot)

Scene indexing / thumbnail generation could be done with the GPU —

IF and ONLY IF

the system were totally idle.

Otherwise, you have the risk of this scenario:

  1. User has a system which can handle only one transcode slot
  2. The scanner is generating thumbnails
  3. A user hits “Play”
  4. What do you say ?
    – “We’re sorry, all system resources are busy right now, please wait …”
    -or-
    – “Insufficient resources, unable to transcode video”
    -or-
    – Kill the thumbnails and then launch playback ?
    – (doable but could take an extra 10+ seconds to start playback)

Engineering decided to make thumbnail generation a ‘background’ task and relegate to the CPU at lowered CPU priority ( nice 20 on Linux )

Plex-cli