Force NAS to transcode?

[u/Rhork777]

I have one client on my network that is constantly trying to transcode videos itself instead of the NAS doing it. It's a optiplex 3040 micro PC with an i7-6700t and 16gb of ram running Windows 11. Whenever I play a video plex shows it's local but hardware transcoding and the PCs GPU is maxing out at 100% along with the CPU in the 90% range and the video is super choppy.

Is there a way to force my NAS (ugreen idx 6011 pro) to transcode for a specific client? Plex is running in a docker container if that makes any difference.

[u/smurfy213]

Your CPU lacks hardware decoding for 10-bit HEVC files. That is why your CPU and IGPU are working so hard trying to play back that 4k video. :)

[u/Rhork777 → u/smurfy213]

It struggles even when I set the quality to 1080 8 mbps in the settings menu.

[u/smurfy213 → u/Rhork777]

The issue is the CPU still does not support x265 10 bit decode so your 11 year old low power cpu is struggling. Do you have another video you can try and play back.

[u/CaptMeatPockets]

Clients cannot transcode, that’s only a server capability. How are you watching on the PC, browser or plex desktop app?

[u/Rhork777 → u/CaptMeatPockets]

Desktop app. So I guess it would be decoding?

[u/CaptMeatPockets → u/Rhork777]

Post a screenshot of the stream from Plex’s dashboard. It will look similar to this:

[u/Rhork777 → u/CaptMeatPockets]

[u/CaptMeatPockets → u/Rhork777]

So is your plex server installed on that machine, or is it installed on the NAS?

[u/Rhork777 → u/CaptMeatPockets]

On my NAS via docker, none of my other PCs or firetvs have any issues just this computer.

[u/CaptMeatPockets → u/Rhork777]

Are you certain about that? If you shut that desktop off, you can still use Plex on other devices? You seem to have several instances of Plex running on the desktop. Are you positive your raw media files aren’t on the NAS, and Plex server is running on the desktop?

If that’s not the case, if you exit the Plex desktop app what do your machine resources look like? Do you still have other Plex instances running?

[u/Rhork777 → u/CaptMeatPockets]

This machine is my garage PC, I just did a fresh windows install yesterday because of this issue with Plex. I installed the Plex desktop application and it's doing the same thing. This machine has nothing to do with the server. I'm not sure what those background processes are but like I said I did a fresh windows install and then installed the Plex desktop app and that's it.

[u/CaptMeatPockets → u/Rhork777]

I mean something isn’t right, that’s an insane amount of CPU for just the Plex desktop app.

Out of curiosity, if you exit out the desktop app, and try and stream from a browser how does it behave?

Have you verified your video drivers are all up to date? Have you tried the Plex HTPC app to see if that works any better?

[u/Rhork777 → u/CaptMeatPockets]

I haven't tried a browser yet, but before I reinstalled Windows it would do the same thing. Here is a pic running plex via firefox browser.

[u/Rhork777 → u/CaptMeatPockets]

[u/N9bitmap → u/CaptMeatPockets]

The server is transcoding to 4k hvec. If the client isn't 4k, it will take a hell of a lot of cpu to scale it down. Set the client quality to 1080p should fix this.

[u/ncohafmuta → u/Rhork777]

Stop transcoding to HEVC on the server. Settings->Transcoder->Enable HEVC video Encoding->Never (will transcode to H264 and client's cpu usage will decrease and gpu's video decode will increase)

Set playback quality to Low/Normal on the client. Settings->Plex for Windows->Player->Video Playback Quality->Low/Normal (client's gpu 3D usage will decrease)

[u/lordpiglet]

Check/update the video driver. Intel has a drive check utility