A monitor or dummy plug must be plugged into the GPU at all times for hardware transcoding to work.Refer to this table (click “complete list” below the first chart).Maxwell / Pascal generation GPUs (or higher) are highly recommended, earlier generations have extremely limited support.PCI-E 6 or 8 pin power connectors(s) (if your GPU requires it).Free PCI-E slot in your server (some cards take up double or triple width).Full hardware transcoding (decoding + encoding) requires Windows 8 / Windows 10 (all editions).RTX/Turing have significant NVENC improvements over the previous generations, but come at a higher cost. Performance and image quality between GTX900/Quadro M and GTX1000/Quadro P series are very similar with only marginal improvements. To get it working, all you have to do is install the latest Nvidia driver for your card, and enable hardware transcoding inside of Plex.īefore you dig through drawers to find an old GPU or start thinking about dividing your SLI in half to speed up your server, there are a ton of things to consider. Nvidia NVENC with GTX / Quadro Series GPUsĪs stated in the introduction, adding a Nvidia card with NVENC to your server is easy. Historically QuickSync has has some severe quality issues, but recently Intel has made a strong effort to improve this with each generation.Īt the time of writing, Nvidia’s NVENC and Intel’s QuickSync are supported by Plex’s Transcoder. The only other currently viable option is Intel’s integrated GPU (iGPU) accelerator known as QuickSync. From here on out, we’ll just refer to it as “NVENC.” Simply put, it’s a very common and easy solution to enable hardware transcoding. This is what Nvidia calls its decoding and encoding engines. Most often, Nvidia GPUs are often recommended for hardware transcoding via NVDEC/NVENC. More importantly, however - hardware transcoding has more limitations, considerations, and compatibility issues than software transcoding. Generally, hardware transcoding is faster and more efficient than software transcoding. This reduces load on the CPU, allowing you to allocate its resources to other things such as Dockers, VMs, or other applications. However, when someone talks about hardware transcoding, they mean using a dedicated piece of hardware (typically a GPU) to accelerate the process. Technically, all transcoding is software in the end. Note: certain file formats like VC1 are limited to single threaded transcoding only. (think of dual CPU systems like the Lego build and the Anniversary build) It’s a multi-threaded process which can take advantage of not only multiple threads, but also multiple phyiscal CPUs. Typically this is accomplished via software run on the CPU of the Plex server. Think of decoding as taking the file apart, and encoding as putting it back together. Simply put, it’s the combination of two processes: decoding and encoding. You’re looking for more transcoding power (this does not affect direct play or direct stream).You have an existing NAS with all of your media on it (this guide will use Unraid as an example).The hardware portion of this guide assumes: Ultimately, the recommendation will be to add a dedicated transcoding box that uses Intel QuickSync. The guide will also provide recommendations for adding hardware transcoding to your existing setup. The purpose of this guide is to give an overview of hardware transcoding with Plex.
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