Thumbnail generation very slow -- Is HW used?

Feature Suggestions
1

Server Version#: Version 1.15.1.710
Player Version#: Latest as of 2/2018

I recently upgraded to a QNAP TS-453 2018 Model. It works great except i have notice thumbnail generation is hilariously slow.
Not bad for keeping up to date, but can be days if a new show is added.

I understand that this is not a full powered PC, however it has Hardware Decoding for transcoding. This seems to work when something is being streamed with transcoding, it says (hw) on the stream.
However for thumbnails, it is extremely slow and uses 95% cpu.
Does thumbnail generation not use the hardware decoding?
Is there a way to check?
If not, is that a bug or expected result?

2

Nope

WAD, aka Working as designed

When said, it’s a good idea, so re-tagged your port to Feature Suggestions and voted for it :wink:

3

Thanks!
At least i know why now.

4

Remember to vote as well :wink:

5

Voted.
In my very uninformed guess, i assume since the transcoding works using HW, it shouldn’t be a major implementation.

6

I sadly disagree here, since there’s so many platforms to consider, as well as all the different HW used.

It’s very complicated

7

Ok.
Well make it work for the QNAP TS-453be 2018 first then…

8

LOL, but it’s all or nothing

9

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13

Could it be possible to use the VAAPI MJPEG encoder combined with the qsv filters for Intel GPUs at least? NVENC also has an MJPEG encoder. Even if you had to do it in 2 passes, first pass to encode the resized and 0.5 fps mjpeg file, and then extract all frames from that to build the bif file. Is the BIF file much more than a mjpeg stream?

15 
ffmpeg -hwaccel vaapi -hwaccel_device /dev/dri/renderD128 -hwaccel_output_format vaapi -i input.mkv -r 1/2 -c:v mjpeg_vaapi -vf 'scale_vaapi=w=320:h=-1:format=nv12' -global_quality 90 -f image2 img-%06d.jpg

This works on my Xeon E3-1245V6 using Linux with ffmpeg 4.0.4 with very little CPU usage. Creates the jpegs at the same size and rate that Plex currently does.

16

Ill take any system that speeds it up!

17

Based on my testing, it’s limited by the speed of the hardware decoder, the JPEG encoding is practically free time wise.

Would be great to have Plex use the hardware for this task.

18

My thumbnail generation just became super fast.
I’ve glanced at changelogs, but didn’t see anything that blatantly said HW acceleration was implemented.

Is something very wrong, or very right…

19
  • (BIF) Improved performance when generating media indexes (#10455)
20

… and I can tell ya… that works as advertised.
Thumb Gen on Nitro.

21

(BIF) Improved performance when generating media indexes (#10455)

Yea, that’s a little vague for such an improvement. I would have used more cursing.

Is it using HW now, or just a much more efficient SW method?

22

I can’t track it down at the moment, but I’m pretty sure one of the devs said it was still software-based, because there were problems with graceful failure when trying to use acceleration for the task.

23

Yea, I don’t have any Hardware enabled, or any that currently works, and these thumbs are flyin’.

I run a LOT of 480p TV Shows and you’ll be lucky to open the Dashboard before they’re done! (in fact, I thought it was broken for a while - until I played a file and scrubbed the bar to find - they’re done…lol)