First a bit of background, I have a passively cooled Plex server with a quad core Celeron. It can’t keep up with software transcoding at 1080p.
Then I heard about NVENC, so without doing any proper research whatsoever I went out and bought a cheap passively cooled GT710.
After purchasing I discovered that most of the internet says this card is incapable of hardware transcoding, however I found two posts on these forums reporting their successful results using this card, so I gave it a go anyway.
Using Open PHT and configuring it to force transcoding I did in fact get hardware accelerated 1080p HVEC transcoding to 1080p H.264 with only 25% CPU usage.
Problem is… I can only do this in Open PHT, every other client seems to use software transcoding.
Any idea what is happening here?
Also occasionally I hear comments about headless servers not being able to use hardware accelerated conversion, is there any truth to this? I was RDP’d to the server when doing this test, but it is headless.
Further the ‘server’ is running Windows 7 Pro.
Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this?
I can confirm that a headless server will have problems. Logging in via RDP won’t do the trick. I’ve heard that when headless, hardware encoding might work, but decode will not, however I haven’t confirmed. You can use an HDMI “dummy plug” to mimic a monitor if desired. This is one example of one, but there are a number of options and prices. That may be your starting point. (Or if you don’t want to waste the money yet, keep a monitor plugged in first and try it out, for testing purposes.)
https://www.amazon.com/Headless-Display-Emulator-Headless-1920x1080-generation/dp/B06XT1Z9TF
I’m also having some sporadic hardware transcoding issues, so I can’t guarantee that it works 100%, but this is definitely a starting point for you.
Thank you for this information, I have ordered a HDMI dummy adapter this morning, your post confirms this was a good decision. Interestingly the test file which I had the hardware transcoding working on, no longer works. The working test was done on the first reboot following installation of the nvidia drivers. The Nvidia control panel was available via RDP at the time, now it is not.
So in response to your question about transcoding on plex and GT 710. I am running Server 2012 on a Q6600 Quad CPU @ 8 gigs with a GT 710 and when enabling transcoding I can push 1080p and 4K content with no issue. Example I used for this was Avengers Infinity War when turning off transcoding I could only push upto 720p. Hope this helps but this factual information not some random bs post where people test or know nothing.
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