Hi, as per the title, I’m wondering if there’s anyway to start plex at boot, before any users logon, and have hardware transcoding work with Intel quicksync.
I’ve tried running it as a service and launching via a scheduled task at startup, they both launch fine but it will only software transcode. I need to logon, kill the plex* processes and then launch as a user if I want HW transcode to work.
I’ve searched the forums & google, the only suggestion that might work would be to configure autologin for a user, then run a script to lock the workstation, but was hoping there would be something less insecure.
Any ideas or workarounds?
Create a separate (local) user account for Plex. A “regular” user is sufficient (i.e. no administrator account).
The stored password is only for this local account, then.
Plus, the part of the registry where it is stored is not accessible from this user account. You’d need admin privileges to do it. (And if you had a malware on the system with admin privileges, Plex is the smallest of your concerns.)
You can tighten down the security of this account by restricting its access permissions to only the media folders. If you don’t use DVR, this could even be read-only.
Of course this solution is only suitable for private use, where you are controlling physical access to the machine. I wouldn’t use it for a company server or when placing the machine in a data center.
I’ll create a new restricted plex user to manage it going forward.
On the off chance as a possible future solution, do you know if running plex in a docker instance at startup in Windows would allow access to hardware encoding via QSV, or is it stuck with the same session restrictions as running plex as a service?
Docker and Windows don’t mix well.
Avoid it. Particularly when you don’t know your way around Linux. Docker just adds another layer of abstraction, which adds to the confusion.
Sorry, should have been clearer, I meant a Windows user dedicated to running Plex.
Thanks for the heads up, I should have gone linux but already had my media setup in NTFS drives and didn’t fancy converting or moving everything, especially since I’ve not ran a Linuux machine for 15+ years.
Merely reading NTFS partitions in Linux shouldn’t be a big issue nowadays.
Going Linux will certainly avoid the whole user login issue, since (contrary to Windows) the architecture of Linux doesn’t prevent access to the GPU for services/daemons.
