I know this question has been asked several times previously, but maybe there’s an update.
I’m current running Plex on an i5 4th gen and CentOS 7. When I run Plex remotely with hardware acceleration activated (Quick Sync) with any h264 mkv movie I get lots of artifacts as scenes change or there’s lots of action. Transcoding is set to Fast and 2 to 4 Mbps on the client.
When I run Plex remotely with hardware acceleration deactivated and the same movies, artifacts are gone but of course cpu usage sky rockets.
Based on a review of forum posts, I believe Intel’s Quick Sync / VAAPI are the culprit and a fix is coming … someday.
Would a low end graphics card fix my artifacting problem?
Any other ideas?
Thanks in advance…
what is the video bit rate and encoding of the source?
Please get and attach the XML for one that fails. “AVC” is too generic unfortunately.
Hover over the item -> Get Info -> View XML.
Paste the XML, (skipping the actor/genre and other superfluous metadata at the bottom).
Before Posting your comment Highlight the block and use Code paragraph formatting from the top bar. It will keep the forum from obscuring it.
I hovered and did Get Info but I didn’t see a XML reference.
Codec H264
Bitrate 9077 kbps
Language English
Bit Depth 8
Chroma Subsampling 4:2:0
Frame Rate 23.976 fps
Height 800
Level 4.1
Profile high
Ref Frames 5
Scan Type progressive
Width 1920
Codec DCA
Channels 5.1
Bitrate 1536 kbps
Language English
Audio Channel Layout 5.1(side)
Profile dts
Sampling Rate 48000 Hz
Maybe I’m not looking in the right place. Anyway hope this helps…
That’s good enough. For future, when you hover, you click Get Info. After that, you see View XML in the lower left corner of the popup 
The info shows H.264 
Is there any way to capture the artifacting? Some of it is just the processor generation and beyond anything we can do, while some of it are actual disturbances in the video stream (small corruptions / illegal values) from when it was initially transcoded down to 9 Mbps.
Thanks, h264 was indicated in my initial post. Anyway artifacting covers the whole display anytime the scene transitions or action. Eventually it disappears when the scene becomes stationary and movement is minimal. Turning off HA fixes the problem.
Would it be worth trying a graphics card to move processing away form the processor to address the generation concern? Does CentOS 7 support this?
Thanks for your help!
You jumped ahead. I was going to ask if turning off HW smoothed it out.
Since you’ve already answered that, the only next step, given the age of the processor family, is to see what comes in updates from Intel. I don’t expect much, if anything, but we can hope. Silicon design age is going against us since 8th generation is on the market and 9th generation is in development now
So is a graphics card worth trying on Centos 7 to bypass Intel QuickSync?
If you can make it work outside of Plex first, yes.
Be prepared because you’ll likely need a 4.x kernel to get the needed Kernel drivers. Centos 7 is still a 3.10 kernel
I’ll work on another plan… disappointing…
Use Fedora and lock revision at 26. Not so hard
Thanks, my file server hosts Plex so changing the OS would be complicated.
Not really as complicated as you might think.
At the top of the Linux forum, I’ve created a number of Linux Tips.
In there, you can make a full backup of your current installation and do what you need/want with it.
The beauty of Linux is that a tarball (.tar file) is its portability.
Create on system A.
Copy to some place safe if reinstalling the OS or take to the new Linux box
Install on ‘new’
Stop Plex
Extra the tar ball in position
sudo chown -R plex:plex ./Library
Start Plex
All the instructions are in the thread under Linux Tips
Thanks, I’ll look into it.
As an fyi I tried an h265 demo file and it played absolutely perfectly.
Codec HEVC
Bitrate 31695 kbps
Bit Depth 10
Chroma Subsampling 4:2:0
Color Range tv
Color Space bt2020nc
Frame Rate 23.976 fps
Height 1600
Level 5.1
Profile main 10
Ref Frames 1
Width 3840
I’ll run with Hardware Acceleration turned off as it is producing artifacts with h264 content. It is interesting that when HA is turned off that the file plays perfectly with no artifacts.
Based on above, one would assume that a 4th Gen CPU is just old and needs to be replaced with a newer generation as you indicated: however, given an h265 file plays perfectly with HA turned on leads me to believe there’s a problem somewhere else.
