Why isnt plex team dropping everything making hw transcoding 4K work for everyone?

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Why isnt the Plex team dropping everything they are doing and use 100% of their resources in solving everything that has to do with making HW-transccding 4K/UHD videos on Plex?

Lets make a scenario…

Theres an app out there that only plays SD material, no HD-material can be played. And if it can be played, its only works for some of the users, and some of the HD-videos.

Would you use that app in 2019?

enter today…

Now we have plex. It plays HD material fine, but when it comes to 4K/UHD the “remote part” of plex is useless. Since the only way for most of the userbase is to direct play it.

And 4K/UHD is getting bigger and bigger. Soon it will be more widely used than HD. And people will not look twice at software/services that “only” has HD videos.

So if plex isnt solving this soon, a lot of users will just ditch it.

And if they just dont give a crap about the remote part of plex (i.e transcoding) any longer, then why use plex at all when 4K/UHD is bigger then HD? there are great alternatives out there for local playing of videos, that handle 4K/UHD.

so, why arent the plex team dropping everything, making HW-transcoding of 4K videos work for everyone?

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remind me… what exactly isn’t working for you when it comes to 4K/UHD?

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4K HW transcoding works just fine for me with the exception of tonemapping. Is this the deficiency you are referring to as you did not provide specifics?

Plex Dashboard using 1.14.1.5488 on Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS
image

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@tom80H anything that has to do with transcoding 4K/UHD.

If i try it the “regular” way with the CPU it wont start, at all. But thats because the CPU is only a I7-7567U with passmark score of 6496. So thats not on plex…
If i try with HW-transcoding, it starts, sometimes. But buffers A LOT. But HW-transcoding should work for me, in theory, since its a “Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650”.

The server is running on an Intel NUC with Kaby Lake I7-7567U 3.5 GHz, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 250GB M.2 2280 PCI Express 3.0 x4 (NVMe) and 1Gbit LAN (100Mbit WAN)

And i’ve tried on serveral different clients, ranging from nvidia shield, apple tv’s, web app, laptops, mobiles and so on…

I actually also tried running the plex server on a ASUS ESC500 G4 M3H with a “PNY Quadro P2000 5GB” Graphics card, same issue there.

@Achilles Ok, good for you! You’re one of the 1% users that it actually works for.

And guess you’re not surfing the web a lot? Most, if not all, forums and reddit threads that contains a question about HW-transcoding 4K/UHD has the answer “Keep the 4K videos in a separate library! Use direct play/stream capable devices. Do NOT transcode!”

And no, its not the “tonemapping deficiency” im refering to, its the issue that most of the users cant get the HW-transcoding to work, at all. Even if they have hardware that, in theory, should suffice (have the required specs).

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Please do not be rude or I will close this thread.

I have the same NUC. I am deducing that you are likely using Windows. Just a week ago due to all the posts on the internet I had read re: this issue and reports from other Plex Ninjas, I volunteered my free time to personally reproduce and test transcoding HEVC source material using Windows PMS. I was able to reproduce the reported issues.

The developer is aware of the HEVC HW transcoding deficiency and resolving it is dependent on Plex updating the Plex transcoder to the latest FFmpeg. The root of the problem is that under Linux there is support for QSV zero-copy using VAAPI but under Windows there is not yet. The Plex devs do not have an ETA for me. However @chrisallen may be able to shed more light on this as he is a Plex employee working closely with the dev.

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Yes, im using Windows 10 on the PC that Plex server is running on.

Not sure if you’re talking about “my” issue now, or the one that you mentioned earlier about tonemapping?

But, lets say you were talking about my issue. Are you saying that if i install some linux distro on it, instead of windows. I will be able to HW-transcode everything, without all the buffering?

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I am talking about HW transcoding not actually working under Windows. It decodes using software after it fails HW decoding. However it encodes using HW thus you get sub 1.0x transcode speeds. This results in constant buffering. In my testing, HEVC to H.264 transcoding performed at 0.5-0.7x under Windows 10. On Linux using the same NUC, I am able to get 5.0-6.0x HW transcoding and the logs show its QSV decode and QSV encode. This is what is referred to as zero-copy since the transcoding is never copied to CPU and then back to the QSV ASIC.

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Ok, thanks. that the first time anyone here actually took the time to explain what the issue is. And inform me that its actually worked on.

all the other threads have been “post logs” and then nothing… Or just “dont know what it its…”

Too bad i dont know my way around linux. So guess ill have to wait for it to be solved.
Sure hope its soon…

But again, thanks for the information!

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Its not something easily understood by the average user. Its being looked at and made a high priority already. Ubuntu Desktop 18.04.2 LTS is not that difficult to set up. Its the Windows of Linux. If you want to give it a try and run into issues just ask here or in a PM.

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thanks, but setting it up wont be the hard thing for me to do. The tough nut to crack will be all the issues i will stumble across in a couple of years from now. that i do not know how to solve, since i dont have time to learn linux. and i think it will be hard to find you then. :slight_smile:

im to old to switch OS. :slight_smile:
ill just stick to windows.

by the way, i hope there will be some information when this issue finally is solved?
im not reading the forum that much, and have lots of other stuff happening in my life, so would be great if there was clear information when its finally solved. like big letters in red on some kind of release notes. :slight_smile:

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It will be posted in the release notes under Release Announcements

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its now about 1 month later and no update with a fix for making HW-transcoding work when running the server on windows are out yet.

Have you @Achilles by any chance got an ETA from the devs now?

and i see that @chrisallen hasnt answered here yet either, after you tagging him here. Have you (chrisallen) by any chance any info to give about when there will be a fix?

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I do not have any information on ETAs. I know as much as you know.

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@nmbrg is it not working as expected on the latest 1.15.3.858 posted just yesterday ?

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@Achilles ok, sorry to hear that. guess i have to do more of that thing called waiting.

@TeknoJunky no its not, and dont know why it should. that release says nothing about fixing the issue were talking about in this thread.

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I’m interested too in the development since I’ve got a P2000.
I hope the next release is the one with the transcoding improvement. Please Devs :pray:

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@Achilles

Ive been trying to get Emby team to fix HW-transcoding since nothing is happening here.
But seems nothing happens there as well… :slight_smile:

but i found out a little more information.
Thought id share it here, and see what you have to say about that.
seems what you said about zero-copy isnt the whole truth. since i have issues with HEVC with both SDR and HDR.

a dev on emby said this:

Blockquote

Zero-Copy conversion means that no data is transferred back to the CPU for processing.

Emby for example does support this with QuickSync on Windows - for HEVC 8bit.

But QuickSync has no built-in hardware color-space conversion capability.

That’s why zero-copy transcoding cannot be done when the source is HEVC 10 bit

(the result has to be 8bit for H.264)

Blockquote

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What Luke said is correct re: QSV and tonemapping. For now it is Zero-copy on my system since Plex does not even bother trying to tonemap. QSV with the upcoming Intel Ice Lake will support HW tonemapping. However since Plex does not share public roadmaps, there is no telling how long after Ice Lake’s release before Plex will support that.

With that being said, I like the thread created by @TeknoJunky re: 4K Rules. Even when tonemapping is enabled, its not going to look better using the 4K UHD HDR10 sources over the 1080p SDR sources for transcoding. A compromise will have to be made by server admins—

  1. Storage usage for copies of both 4K HDR10 and 1080p SDR of the same media content

or

  1. Non-optimal HDR10 to SDR transcoded picture quality.
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@Achilles not sure if i misunderstood what you just wrote. But if i understood correctly you gave no explanation to why hw-transcoding is failing when trying to transcode a SDR hevc.
Only why it fails on HDR hevc.

And since i have this issue on SDR HEVC as well. i guess there is more bugs/problems with plex than what you just said.

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He did answer you. FFMPEG and Windows drivers are not working together unless you drop back a version or two and reported in another thread.

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