I would like to ask someone from Plex staff / Ninjas if there are some quality improvements for WD HW transcoder underway.
So far the quality of transcoded stream is horrible, image is full of artifacts even for 5 MB/s+ bitrates - when there is lot of movement on the scene, the picture turns to the heap of fuzzy blocks until next keyframe kicks in. I would understand that on low bitrates, but for example on 8 MB/s transcoded stream it should not be happening.
Please guys, give HW transcoding some much needed tweaks.
Quick question for you @corwin_x , what is the format of your media your running on the WD HW? I had similar issues when I took mine on my cruise. I was running .mp4 videos and didn’t have video quality issues but more of buffering issues from time to time. Audio files ran fine (.mp3) but don’t require hardly any transcoding. I chalked it up to poor hardware specs (kinda like installing PMS on Sysnology NAS’s / poor hardware (CPUs) = poor transcoding)
Plex doesn’t have any control over the HW transcoder. There are very few parameters available that we can set. Any improvements will need to come from WD.
Sorry, but not buying that. It is your custom version of ffpeg trascoder supporting quicksync, correct me if I am wrong. That means nothing proprietary from WD side.
Even if I assume that you are correct, can you at least tell me if this was raised with WD and if you have any feedback from them?
And by the way, if you stand by your statement that it is up to WD to provide fix, you are effectively saying that this device has been abandoned. WD has been more that useless in fixing serious security flaws (more than a year from announcement of security vulerabilities to getting a fixed firmware), so my guess is that timeframe to fix the non-serious issue like this would be counted in centuries. Thread from WD support forums, have fun reading
Bump no. 3 - there are several threads in WD section complaining about transcoding. So simple question - are you going to fix the hw transcoder or not?
What version of PMS are you running? I had this issue awhile ago but it seems to be much better in later updates (I’m running version 1.8.0.4109 right now), though, I’ll be honest, it ain’t the best quality, but definitely improved over before.
I use 1.8.1.4139 - I can agree with you that there was a slight improvement, but it is still far from perfect. To illustrate, yesterday I have played mkv that transcoded to cca 20mbit stream h.264 and there were still artifacts on fast moving scenes.
Bump no. 4 - Plex, are you gonna fix the HW transcoding or not? The quality is just unacceptable, people are complaining in the WD section of the forum and apparently you could not be bothered to adress the issue.
YOU have promoted the PR series as best solution for Plex, and I wonder if you will take some responsibility for the outcome.
If I wanted machine that is able to direct play only in order to get acceptable results, I could have purchased much cheaper NAS.
Links to some forums with same theme - broken HW transcoder on PR series.
EDIT - I would like to ask one of the mods to unmark this as answered, because it is not - blaming the WD for something that is Plex responsibility is NOT the answer.
@corwin_x said:
Sorry, but not buying that. It is your custom version of ffpeg trascoder supporting quicksync, correct me if I am wrong. That means nothing proprietary from WD side.
Even if I assume that you are correct, can you at least tell me if this was raised with WD and if you have any feedback from them?
And by the way, if you stand by your statement that it is up to WD to provide fix, you are effectively saying that this device has been abandoned. WD has been more that useless in fixing serious security flaws (more than a year from announcement of security vulerabilities to getting a fixed firmware), so my guess is that timeframe to fix the non-serious issue like this would be counted in centuries. Thread from WD support forums, have fun reading
Don’t take it personally. He’s often wrong about a lot of things then has to then “check”.
i thought WD PR nas were designed to do HW transcode perfectly before all these beta of HW transcode were available in other platform. i was tempted to buy one but im not digging dockers installing apps.
I can live with limited app support, but what’s driving me nuts is when device does not do what it was advertised to do, and complaints are just ignored. I am attaching image with 10 Mbps transcoded steam (original is 19 Mbps) - that’s how the hw transcoding looks like - useless unwatchable heap of fuzzy blocks.
thats worser than i thought. i hope they fix this WD issue first before those hw beta ones because i know plex adverstise this WD PR ones capable handling HW transcode.
Bump no. 4 and still no meaningful response. I wonder how namy bumps it will take to get some reaction?
I am really sorry for pinging, but maybe @ChuckPA can give some insight on the matter?
I did my own research on the side, can these quality issues be caused by the Intel vaapi used in WD tailored plex build?
@corwin_x said:
Sorry, but not buying that. It is your custom version of ffpeg trascoder supporting quicksync, correct me if I am wrong. That means nothing proprietary from WD side.
Correct. QuickSync is an ability built into the GPU. That’s why it’s called hardware transcoding. We can’t control the hardware. In basic terms, we pass the video to QuickSync and the hardware does it’s own internal routine to spit out the output. If you read up on QuickSync, you will find that the quality produced by QuickSync (not just on WD devices) is not as good as when using software transcoding. QuickSync is made mostly for speed and not quality. Newer versions of QuickSync does produce better quality but still not up to the results you get from software transcoding. If you need better quality, you can turn off hardware transcoding and use software transcoding, which we do have control over, but this takes up CPU power which these devices don’t have much of.
Ffmpeg has speed to quality presets that affects quality of resulting transcode, at least below white paper from Intel says that, and I guess they should know a thing or two about it. https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/cloud-computing-quicksync-video-ffmpeg-white-paper.pdf
But now let’s say Intel is wrong and they don’t know their own products.
I bought WD series based on your (Plex) advertisement, which said that the device supports hw transcoding, even that the transcoded video will look “awesome”, link below from your convenience: https://www.plex.tv/wd-my-cloud-pro-series/
Now even if I apply very loose definition of “awesome”, the result above simply does not fit. I would say “crappy, blocky or full of artifacts” would describe it quite well.
I do not know if it looks like false advertising to you, but it definitely looks like that to me. You either openly lied or could not be bothered to test the unit, I will leave for you to decide which is worse.
I had some patience, expecting the quality to be fixed, as this is work in progress. Based on your explanation, I now understand that it actually cannot be fixed.
Therefore, let’s have a theoretical case - I will request WD to take unit back and refund me. If the WD refuses to do that, which I expect, as my problem is caused by 3rd party software, will Plex step in and take the unit and refund me?
Awaiting your response, @“MovieFan.Plex”
QuickSync is just the hardware on the chip, but how it is accessed and utilized is based on the OS, kernels, and drivers. What has been implemented in the PRxxx devices is the best possible that we are able to use. As mentioned, any improvements need to come from WD with newer kernels and drivers that Plex can then use.
It’s like having a 64-bit CPU and running a 32-bit OS on it. Just because the hardware is there, doesn’t mean it is fully utilized.
@“MovieFan.Plex” , you have conveniently missed all the points in my post that you did not want or cannot answer, good job.
I will quote article on your own website:
My Cloud Pro Series also gives you the most transcoding badassery yet. With the ability to transcode multiple (up to 4) simultaneous 1080p streams, your viewing experience will always be top-notch. And, the hardware accelerated video processor means video files will look awesome, even if you are far, far away or on a mobile device.
Does the above posted screenshots look “badass”, “awesome” or “top notch”?
The driver for hw transcoding, at least for what I was able to find, is supplied with plex install. If it is build by plex or 3rd party I do not know, and quite frankly, as a customer, I do not care. File name is i965_drv_video.so if you want to check that.
Transcoder is, again, provided as a part of plex package. From what I have been able to piece together, it is ffmpeg transcoder modified by Plex to better suit your purposes.
As for the intel graphics driver and kernel, I am not enough linux savvy to dispute your statement, but that bring us to square one - if you were not sure how device will handle transcoding, you should not have advertised it as the best goddamn thing since sliced bread for Plex transcoding purposes.
So that bring me back to the last question of my previous post - if I create RMA with WD and they refuse to refund 687 EUR this piece cost me, can I count on you to get my money back as the product is “not as advertised” by Plex?
