My plex server is running of my windows 10 computer which has a i5 11600k cpu and a quadro p2000 gpu. I have 1gbps broadband which on which i regulary get approximately 950mbps. My media is stored on a qnap nas ts 453a.
Unfortunately when i try and direct play a 4k file on my firestick max or nividia shield tv pro i keep getting a message saying the server is not powerfull enough but when i transcode down to 1080p everything is fine and it works.
Now is this because my server isnt powerfull enough or is it a bandwidth issue?
On a side note my 4k files have subtitles built in but when i try put them on nothing happens they wont show up.
This message usually refers to your CPU not being powerful enough to handle the 4K transcode. I’m saying “usually” because in the past there used to be some mix-ups where the server/app couldn’t properly distinguish if bandwidth or CPU-power are the culprit.
Your CPU has a passmark score of approx. 19900 points across its 6 cores. This should be powerful enough to handle a regular SDR/HDR movie (probably without further HDR tonemapping). Keep in mind that the encoders cannot evenly split that load across all cores (they are multi-threading but there’s limits to that). Therefore it could well be that your CPU while generally powerful could run into trouble with certain constellations. In that case your best course of action is to look into what’s causing the transcode in the first place and if you can mitigate that.
As I wrote above… your best course of action is to identify what’s causing the file to be transcoded in the first place. Is it maybe something about your files, e.g. some characteristic of the involved tracks (unsupported audio/video codec, unsupported subtitle format, exceeding bandwidth/resolution/bitdepth/… limits).
Understanding that, you can attempt to avoid this from happening.
The demand for 4K transcoding are still extremely higher than those for 1080p content.
Best check the Now Playing tile of your server dashboard while streaming to avoid any confusion. The error message implies that some part of the video is being transcoded.
Hi Tom an update on my playback issue. Turns out its not a transcoding issue its a network issue. The warning says “your connection to the server is not fast enough to stream this video”. My firestick and nvidia shield are connected to my router via powerline adapters and speed test show around 48mbps. So how can increase the speed without dragging a cable from the router to my firestick and shield tv?
Ive also noticed that when me server transcodes its using the cpu instead of the p2000. What setting do i need to change to force it to use my gpu? Ive already added plex in the windows graphics card settings.
48 Mbps is pretty slow for a powerline (assuming the model isn’t all that ancient). You can probably check what’s causing this (common factors are distance or outlets connected on a line with lots of other devices / via a power strip).
You might actually get a better bandwidth using a WLAN (unless there’s generally poor reception, e.g. due to too many walls, furniture, equipment, competing WLANs…).
As for the hardware transcoding:
make sure you have it enabled in the server settings
See: Settings > [Server Name] > Transcoder:
Use hardware acceleration when available
Use hardware-accelerated video encoding
Keep in mind GPUs cannot handle all possible transcoding scenarios. The biggest showstopper seems to be that they’re not able to burn subtitles into a video – so the moment your client cannot deal with a subtitle as-is, it’ll always fallback to CPU/software transcoding.
Yes im not sure but im going to look into it. I have tp link powerline adapters and the advertised speed is 1gb. I didnt expect them to do that but do atleast 300 or something close.
Yes i have got transcoding turned on. I have noticed that it uses cpu most of the time but every now and again you see a spike on the gpu. The point of the gpu was to use it and releave the stress from the cpu. Ive looked it up and some are saying you need to disable the windows internal graphics card, however in device manager the only gpu that shows up is the p2000 and on the bios of my gigabyte Z590 i cant find the option for the integrated graphics card.
