Transcoding Issues - No Hardware Acceleration?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Server Version#: 1.13.8.5395
Player Version#: Plex for Samsung TV - 3.3.4

Hi there,

I’ve been using Plex for a few weeks now, broadcasting from my home desktop (specs below). Mostly using this on the home network though. Everything works brilliantly in conjunction with my Samsung TV running the built in Plex player app. That is everything except 4k media with anything other than AAC audio codecs. As soon as it needs to transcode DMA or other to AAC on the fly it buffers like crazy. Now yes, I know this can be inescapable for some but even some files which seemed to play perfectly a few weeks ago are now struggling.

System specs (Server) - Windows 10
i7 8700k
32gb Ram
Media on 5400rpm Seagate Archive (could this be bottlenecking the transcoder?)
GTX 1080TI
Server on Samsung Evo 970 NVMe (C Drive)
Transcoding Directory on above C Drive

Funnily enough, I can stream the same content to my phone at 4k without issue (possibly because of Samsung’s lack of DTS support?). Only thing that bugs me is that while streaming to my phone, my CPU usage increases whereas when playing to my TV via LAN, the transcoder.exe process uses no CPU at all? What’s going on here? Please see logs / codec info below.

Plex Media Server.log (808.5 KB)
Logan

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Kind regards,
Max.

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From the screenshot, your server doesn’t actually transcode the video. It’s transcoding the audio track which is far less taxing on your CPU (actually almost nothing compared to video transcoding).
In the process of adjusting the audio, Plex is re-muxing the content (original video + transcoded audio in a new container). All in all that shouldn’t get your CPU into sweating.

From the log file it appears the limitation is both on the audio codec (DTS) and number of channels (the client on your tv only supports up to 6 channels, your audio has 8).

As for the bottleneck… hard to tell – is this an internal or external HDD and if it’s an external one, how is it connected?

If you want to reduce the load you could try remux those files – basically what Plex does on-the-fly (transcode the Audio to AC3 5.1 and put the original video stream with the optimized audio stream in a new container, e.g. mp4).

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Hi,
I’m having the same problem.
Reencoding the Audio works fine if done before playing, but re-adding 500 audio files is just too much work…

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Anyone ever figure this out? Why does audio transcoding cause so much buffering?

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