Poor AC3 Transcoding Performace With FreeNAS

After moving to FreeNAS Corral, I can no longer transcode AC3 audio streams; CPU usage spikes to 100% and the PC grinds to a halt before the video starts playing.

At the moment I’m using the plex-pass docker image, running under a boot2docker virtual machine.

I was wondering if anyone has faced similar issues, or can guide further diagnostics. The server was capable of transcoding AC3 streams before, but 1, 2, and 6 stream AC3 is now unplayable. My next idea is to re-encode audio for the AC3 portion of the library to AAC.

Perhaps that helps.

That’s great @Peter_W, thank you very much.