Synology 918+ hardware transcoding not "powerful enough" to playback homerun hd dvr media

[Plex4Anderson]

@Plex4Anderson

I think I will probably buy another stick of RAM either way. In the mean time if you could help me isolate the issue by advising me on how to remove transcoder instances one at a time. Forgive my ignorance but is the i in 1080i the interlacing part? Asking so I can record some content 1080p to eliminate the deinterlacing factor. If that still fails I’d like to know a way to preconvert the audio on some test file to see if that was causing it.

The fact that it can handle all of this (for one recorded 1080i stream anyway) with the processor transcoding alone hints to me that I’m in some corner case/regression that we haven’t yet found. When hardware transcoding it’s like it does 1 segment then doesn’t start up the other one in time or something.

I would be happy to try some other version if you have a “known good” for playing HomerunHD recorded content with hardware transcoding.

Here are some screen grabs of resource utilization while hardware transcoding and cpu transcoding.

[ChuckPa]

Here’s a way to do the post processing. There are other scripts like this floating around.

DVR-Postprocessing-Script on Synology

Hi, I copied a postprocessing scipt form the plex forum for transcode dvr-movies but only what I get is error 1. #!/bin/bash dvrPostLog=’/volume1/homes/plex/dvrProcessing.log’ echo “=================================” | tee -a dvrPostLog [ # -ge 1 -a -f “$1” ] echo “date '+%Y-%m-%d'” | tee -a $dvrPostLog echo "date '+%H:%M:%S' file ‘$1’ is opened" | tee -a $dvrPostLog ffmpeg -i “1" -acodec copy -vcodec libx264 -preset superfast "{1%.ts}.mp4” echo "date '+%H:%M:%S' conversion done. new fil…

[Plex4Anderson]

I guess it’s not surprising, but if I use the above ffmpeg command then hardware transcoding works without issue. Plex then knows that I have a 1080i stream as well as a 1080p stream and uses the 1080p.
Since it can do the deinterlace and transcode without hardware transcoding, I have to believe that somehow the CPU deinterlace and hardware transcode aren’t cooperating with each other very well. I find this issue on anything recorded from my homerun HD that was broadcast interlaced. Is this setup working for anyone/do you think this conclusion is incorrect?

[ChuckPa]

In looking back at the above screenshot of memory. 2.6 GB of cached memory is good. that’s 2.6GB of memory DSM can grab in an instant. It will be more than happy to use it as a disk cache until needed which is precisely what that indicates. Memory utilization profile is perfect.

As far as conversion from interlaced to progressive, I thought (i don’t have DVR here – only satellite ) you can have it deinterlace after the capture in PMS itself or am I mistaken?

[Plex4Anderson]

I have found no option to do this either in the transcoder settings or the DVR settings.

But it should be able to do it in real time since it can do it with the CPU alone in real time. It almost has to be something fishy in the way the CPU deinterlaces segments and queues them up for the hardware transcoder. Almost like if there isn’t a segment ready for the hardware transcoder it gives up or something.

[Plex4Anderson]

I believe this to be a bug, but have no way to confirm that and don’t know if you accept bug reports.

[Plex4Anderson]

This is still an issue in Version 1.16.5.1488

[Plex4Anderson]

Even though I could never get anyone to admit this was a problem, it has been resolved in version 1.16.6.1592. Live TV and 1080p playback now work with hardware transcoding on Synology.