Video decode not working in VM (with Nvidia Quadro P2000)

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Hi,

I’m trying to get hardware transcoding to work on my Plex server.

Plex is encoding the video with the GPU, but it’s not decoding. When I play the file directly (with VLC or the Windows media player) it’s using the GPU to decode. YouTube video’s are also decoded with the GPU, so decoding works correctly on the system. Still, Plex is only encoding the video, but not decoding the video. Based on this it seems like this is a limitation of Plex, or it’s not correctly detecting the GPU. Would there be any way to make this work?

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When playing the video directly on the VM it uses the GPU to decode.

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When playing the video on Plex it uses the GPU to encode, not decoding, which is handled by the CPU.

OS: Windows 10 Pro, running on an ESXi hypervisor, Plex is running as a service
Server Version#: 1.13.8.5395
Player Version#: 3.67.1

In the logs I’m seeing the following:

Sep 28, 2018 03:17:04.720 [6288] DEBUG - TPU: hardware transcoding: zero-copy support not present
Sep 28, 2018 03:17:04.720 [6288] DEBUG - TPU: hardware transcoding: final decoder: , final encoder: nvenc

Edit:
Tried with Emby, with that transcoding / decoding works. I also saw ffmpeg which consumed about 15% CPU + 50% GPU for this video. So it’s not a problem with the VM, but how Plex detects the decoding capabilities I guess.

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2

I guess make sure dxva is installed? Plex uses dxva to hw decode on windows

3

Isn’t DXVA part of Windows?

I used DXVA Checker to see if that’s working, seems like it works like normal. This also seems correct, as video decoding is working with the Windows media player and VLC, but not in Plex.

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4

I just saw that you’re running plex as a service. I believe hw decode doesn’t work when run as a service (some windows thing). I don’t know the details because I don’t use windows for plex but there are quite a few threads about it if you search. I just remember seeing it a bunch of times

1 Like
5

Thanks, that seemed to be the issue…

A bit weird that Plex isn’t mentioning this on their support page (https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/)

Guess I’ll have to find another workaround for starting Plex automatically then…

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