Lol, didn’t know it was that old of a technology.
quicksync is old, but you still need a newish cpu to support to 1080 or higher decode/encode.
in the picture above, the transcoder is software decoding VC1 and hardware encoding x264.
the wiki chart @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video shows what cpu models support as far as decode/encode.
Ahh, I didn’t quite know how to read that. Interesting.
thanks for the info y’all.
You don’t need quick sync. I use a I7 4930k no igpu at all. I use a AMD R9 280X and it uses H/W transcode. Supposedly Nvidia GTX and Quadro below k2000 are limited to two streams. AMD is limited to the power of the gpu. But no artificial limit.
I would never go for hardware encoding since quality is always below software (CPU) transcoding!
@ max
well for those of us with less CPU than GPU, what matters is whether it can keep up with real time transcoding.
For offline permanent file conversion, cpu might very well be preferable. But to simply watch real time transcoded media in the easiest manner, PQ is not necessarily the most important aspect.
Beside, have you done an blind ABx test on the same media files transcoded by cpu and gpu, compared to each other and the non-transcoded source? Or are you just regurgitating what you read somewhere?
@TeknoJunky said:
Beside, have you done an blind ABx test on the same media files transcoded by cpu and gpu, compared to each other and the non-transcoded source? Or are you just regurgitating what you read somewhere?
To be fair it may be neither. It may simply be that his personal way of doing things for his personal needs works for him and that’s fine… But anyone who does things differently with different needs, different playback clients is doing it wrong. (That said, the “You’re doing it wrong if you’re not doing it like me” is usually more endemic amongst the “several thousand posts” brigade and in no way aimed at @max_plexibility )
For example.
You have an AV receiver with Atmos, TrueHD, DTS-HD MA etc?.. well i haven’t, so you’re doing it wrong.
You’re main client can happily direct play a 4K MKV Remux with HDR or a 1080p MKV remux… well mine can’t so, you’re doing it wrong.
You think 4K offers any visual advantage? …you’re doing it wrong.
You have a 60" TV…You’re doing it wrong.
If fact if you are doing anything other than MP4 with AAC 5.1 … you’re doing it wrong.
Personally I do have the HD Audio capable receiver and I don’t use garbage clients.
I get to watch my media in optimal quality and the people I share my server with are more than happy with the quality via HW transcoding on their varying size screens be it the Android Phone or their 40-60" TV’s, with pretty much zero impact on the CPU. I’m happy, they’re happy so i guess I will just carry on doing it wrong.
I really do wish i could find the post a while back saying how bad their experience of GPU encoding was. Their test case apparently was a file compressed to death in handbrake and then further ran thru Plex HW transcoder and it didn’t look very good… Who Knew!!
Hardware transcoding from a near as dammit original source looks great.
All that said, I can actually see pre encoding in MP4 with AAC does have its place in certain cases. (Poor server hardware and too much time on their hands for firstly encoding and then stripping metadata from the resulting file spring to mind as examples.)
Whether that usage scenario applies in the majority of cases is a different matter. But when blindly advocating it to a newbie without asking about their server/client/AV receiver or even if their planned usage would ever even call for transcoding in the first place etc… Then Meh!!!
Still it bumps up their post count and ego if not their intellect.
^ Good post.
I come from an old school xbmc/kodi background, so personally as an archivist/librarian, I usually preferred to keep highest quality/most original version available (ie directly ripping from CD/DVD/BR/UHD) and losslessly remuxing, and let client do the heavy lifting (decoding).
Switching to plex, mainly for remote/mobile watching/listening and family sharing, puts a lot more importance on the server in order to get the applicable stream to the various clients.
1080p playback has pretty much become ubiquitous, but now the big challenge of course is 4k and hdr compatibility. And of course, pretty much no mobile network or devices are very well suited to direct 4k playback.
As far as I am thinking, when your dealing with 50+ meg UHD files, what is another ~1gig for a mobile optimized version to keep along side it.
So yeah, everyone’s priorities and options are different, and even as equally valid.
All that said, in my limited testing, I could not tell any visual difference between cpu and gpu encodes versus the original source when use same or similar settings.
Changing resolutions/bit rates of course can be noticable of course, but if you have to downsize to meet the needs of the client, is going to change the quality no matter if you do it real time, or if you re-transcode/convert ahead of time.
if you run ubuntu as your plex server you can enable unlimited hw transcodes on consumer cards its a software limitation so its just requires a patch. I run plex in docker so my setup is a bit different but it works. Everything is posted on Github. there is a link below to youtube video tutorial. The 10XX cards do support more formats like HEVC that the 9XX series cards don’t link is below also.
a video showing how is below
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Hello,
I have an Intel Core i7-8700 CPU and GeForce GTX 1060 6GB OC. Should I enable the HW decoding or the CPU is powerful enough with default settings ?
Although your CPU is very capable, it becomes a matter of opinion at this point. If you’re a videophile that examines every single pixel that crosses your screen, then you may want to roll forward without HW Acceleration. If you want the performance gain, then enable it.
Some claim to be able to see the difference in quality. I personally can’t see it. I enabled it when the offering first became available, and I haven’t thought about it since.
Ok, I’ll do some tests. I have never seen my CPU suffers during transcoding. I have a 40 inch TV so I don’t believe I’ll see a big difference anyway
I RUN I7 7700K GPU GTX1070TI HW ENABLED 10TIMES FASTER AND NO QUALITY DIFERENCE, is like u enabled another cpu. Everything is much quicker with hw enabled and specially the sound. In my opinion gpu rendering and transcoding is net superior ps is true i run plex on m2ssd raid intel inteligent drive active for beast performance transfer and transcoding, expensive but quality
Maybe you should spend some time in school, and less fiddling with Plex.
(edit: I suppose some people are allergic to the truth, the previous post was completely unreadable, even though I was a bit direct perhaps)
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