Hi - I’m trying to track down the cause of my PMS crashing whenever it attempts to use Hardware Transcoding.
Basically, if I play back some content that requires transcoding, then the entire PMS exits when Hardware Transcoding is enabled so I need to get back into the machine and relaunch it. This is whether it is playback or a sync conversion. If I disable Hardware Transcoding then it all seems to work fine.
The current server version is 1.17.0.1709, but I rolled back to the latest 1.16 and the same thing happens.
The GPU is an Intel 630 with latest drivers installed, on Win 10 Pro, all updates applied.
To be honest, I haven’t had to transcode for a while so I’m not sure when this started. The only applications I have installed on the machine are PMS, Drobo dashboard and the Intel driver updater thing, but that has been the case for a long time so for a long time it all worked together.
I’m happy to perform any troubleshooting as needed - have done some searches but anything that sounds close is quite old and on different platform. That also makes me wonder if it is unique to my machine, so even if I could get some tips on where to look next then I can take it from there.
To get it to crash, I play content via Plex Web. Initially it will playback at original bitrate, so then I go to the Now Playing options and change to 720p 4MBs, then it instantly crashes, and Plex Web hangs as the rug has been pulled out under it.
If I use any other client and make it transcode it will crash also.
Every time I’ve looked at this the log ends at
DEBUG - Jobs: Starting child process with pid 8532
Of course, as soon as I reopen PMS then a lot new lines appear, so this log is before reopening.
The logs are from a few moments ago, the crash dump is from yesterday under the same circumstances - for some reason I couldn’t get one today?
Suspect it could be related to what’s happening with me.
Hardware transcoding stopped working altogether after upgrade to 1.17.0.1709.
Logs were reporting that my NVIDIA driver wasn’t capable of decoding stream (FFMpeg error -nvenc 8.1 installed but required 9 - i think was the error).
Upgraded video drivers to the latest and it still doesn’t work - and no further errors reported
Well I just upgraded to the latest PMS - version 1.18.0.1846 - and all seems to be working well again! Re-enabled Hardware Encoding and it does not crash.
I started having this issue today on one of my Plex Media Servers after patching both with the latest windows updates (sigh) and latest intel drivers.
Both are very similar spec. Both have Windows 10 1903. Both are Intel CPU based. Neither have a GPU card. The one that it continually crashing with Hardware Transcode enabled is using a i7-7700K CPU (no over clock) (Intel HD 630). The other one with a i7-8700 CPU (Intel UHD 630) is working fine.
I rolled back PMS from 1.18.0.1846 to 1.17…and to 1.16…all had the same issue. I eventually rolled the video driver back and it started working fine again.
The offending driver for the HD 630 was Version: 26.20.100.7212.
I rolled back to one that was from the same(ish) date as the video driver that was working on the i7-8700 CPU. This was Version: 26.20.100.6890.
So, looks like Intels latest video drivers are causing some issues with Intel GPUs and hardware Transcode.
Interesting. I do remember updating the drivers over the last few weeks, so that might have been what resolved it for me rather than the upgrade to 1.18.x of PMS.
