Hi,
Saw a thread regarding this problem on unraid where plex employee replied nvidia 450++ driver is required for NVENC now.
This breaks NVENC for us with P2000 cards on every Windows version except Windows 10 since Nvidia driver is EOL since january 2020 for older Windows versions.
Is this intended and unavoidable?
This effects every user (?) stuck on older nvidia drivers.
I have since this post learned that the 450.66 requirement is Linux only so I’ll be back with logs since it’s not working after the version mentioned.
Did a bit of research. Nvidia driver 445.87 is the minimum requirement for Windows now if you want NVENC to work, since ffmpeg is now compiled with NVENC V10 API. This means P2000 HW transcoding is dead for every Windows version except for Windows 10.
Oct 07, 2020 08:47:59.570 [12736] ERROR - [Transcode] [FFMPEG] - Driver does not support the required nvenc API version. Required: 10.0 Found: 9.0
Oct 07, 2020 08:47:59.570 [12736] ERROR - [Transcode] [FFMPEG] - The minimum required Nvidia driver for nvenc is 418.81 or newer
The error given by ffmpeg is simply not true. Minimum required driver is 445.87. I’m on 441.66 which is the latest version since driver support for my OS is EOL.
Anyone at Plex care to confirm I’m screwed?
Anyone?
Same issue here. Quadro P2000 on Windows 10, drivers are up to date.
I just ended up reverting to 1.20.1.3252 
Really? Win 10 with 445.87 or later? If so, more users should be affected… maybe they havent noticed yet… still waiting for someone from Plex to reply.
You will wait forever if you are expecting someone from Plex support to respond. As many bugs as I have chimed in on in these forums…only a handful in the very beginning ever got noticed
Hmm… I bought a Quadro P2000 awhile back since intel transcoding broke with the PMS 1.18. I just had a friend of mine that was streaming a video and I had noticed my CPU usage spiking to 100%… Plex wasn’t using transcoding at all despite the option being enabled on PMS. I’m running PMS: 1.20.3.3437 on Windows 10 w/ the 452.39 NVidia drivers… It doesn’t look like NVENC is being utilized at all now…
So I did some testing with the raw ffmpeg builds. Version 4.3 works with nvenc and version 4.3.1 I get an error about API version. Driver does not support the required nvenc API version. Required: 10.0 Found: 9.1. I also tried with one of the nightly builds [ffmpeg-N-99865-ga125e08130-win64-gpl.zip and I got a different error Driver does not support the required nvenc API version. Required: 11.0 Found: 9.1. Seems that this is only going to get worse.
I see plenty of other video related products out there where over the years they have had this same issue with Nvidia drivers/API version and ffmpeg. The solutions in the past are to use a previous ffmpeg version, or wait for an updated driver from Nvidia. Obviously we cant downgrade ffmpeg because Plex custom builds their own version of ffmpeg and wraps some of their code around it to make the PlexTranscoder.exe executable…this is something that I have wished for years that Plex would fix. I wish they would use the stock version of ffmpeg so that in times like this we can revert that on our own but still move forward with Plex code to get new features and big fixes; basically de-couple ffmpeg from Plex. So as I see if we have 2 options…wait for Nvidia to update the drivers (assuming that they will and they aren’t trying to deprecate older video cards), or we all have to upgrade video cards to something that is currently supported with API version 11.
Pretty much the same as I’ve concluded with.
What happens if you replace plextranscoder.exe with an older version? Plex goes bonkers?
I’ve started looking for alternatives as this pretty much makes my setup useless.
Not sure why anyone would not want to be on win 10 at this point, everything older is a great risk of exploitation.
If you can’t afford or simply don’t want w10, then perhaps it’s time to start learning Linux.
Unfortunately yes. New versions of PMS will require drivers 450+.
Can someone from Plex work on decoupling FFMpeg from the PlexTranscoder process so that in times like this we could manually roll back the version of FFMpeg and yet move forward withy new versions of Plex.
Not possible. FFMPEG is integrated into the transcoder, it’s not just an API call. Have you tried replacing the entire PlexTranscoder.exe with an older version. I don’t know if it will work, but worth a try.
Oh!
From the latest beta changelog:
Yeah, I’m trying to get clarification if that means older drivers are supported again.
I have filed a bug ticket with FFMpeg
I have been trying to file a bug with Nvidia, but I cant find a way to open a case with them.
It does seem to work again on current Beta.
E.g., Tautulli shows H264 (HW) 1080p -> H264 (HW) 720p where previously HW was absent on the encoding side and high CPU usage.
Win7-64/Quadro M2200/436.30 driver
I can also confirm HW transcoding is working again with older drivers.
I have verified that PMS version 1.20.5.3600 for Windows works again with NVENC hardware transcoding.
