How to setup Nvidia in Plex docker for hardware transcoding?

  • Here is a very detailed tutorial. Follow those steps one by one.


  • Here is a very detailed tutorial. Follow those steps one by one.


    I might just reinstall omv and follow this tutorial, im 100% new to linux so ill see how it goes. Thanks

  • So i got up to Step 7 but i do not have Plex installed at that point (from fresh install) and to be honest I am unsure how to install plex through portainer correctly. I tried doing it from another guide but then i was unable to edit the parts mentioned in Step 7.

    If you can point me to how to install plex and edit (unless I can install with those variables already).

  • my GTX 970 was not compatible

    Do you by any chance still remember any details about the GTX 970? I just got Plex transcoding "working" on one thanks to chris_kmn 's guide, but I have a problem where the GPU is at 2% computing usage and 133MB memory usage while the video still chugs like hell.

  • Did you check if the codec of your video(s) is supported by your card ?


    Nvidia codec matrix


    Audio codecs could also be an issue because they are transcoded by the cpu. So if you have a poor cpu and a complex codec like atmos it could, but very unlikely, the cause.


    And transcoding is a process of first decoding the source codec and the encoding to the target codec. So if only one codec is supported by your card it shows hw-transcoding but the other half of the job has to be done by cpu.


    The older gtx cards don‘t support many codecs. My be you should look for a used nvidia quadro p400 p600 or higher. The have good codec support

  • Did you check if the codec of your video(s) is supported by your card ?

    The videos are MKV, would that mean they're not supported by HW transcoding at all? I don't know a whole lot about codecs, but AFAIK all the H.x codecs are for MP4 containers. Most of my collection is in MKV and AVI and the few MP4's I have are not beefy enough to chug the CPU/GPU. I'm trying to do some 4K 10bit HDR here.


    The server is running a 4th gen i5, but I don't have a very good idea of how much load such a task would generate. I did originally come here because the playback was (just as) bad without GPU acceleration though. nvidia-smi did show Plex transcoding tasks running, but as I said, they never consumed over 3% of the GPU's computing power.


    Playing the video files themselves from a SMB share went perfectly fine, so I don't think network speed or HDD speed would be a limiting factor here.


    I have a Quadro FX1800 lying around the house, but seeing that it's not even listed it probably wouldn't be much help.

  • .mkv is only the container. The codec is something different. But plex shows in the media info which codec is used in the video.


    Did you try to turn off subtitles ? Different streaming devices and/or clients have issues with different subtitle formats.


    You also have to activate „automatic quality“ on the client. If not the client device has to do the transcoding job.


    But first of all I would find out the codec of your stuttering video an check with the matrix if encoding and decoding is supported by your card

  • Thank you, turns out the stuttering video is in HEVC, which the 970 does not support. I tried out a few H.244 1080p movies and they play fine and display HW transcoding, but the GPU still only rarely spikes up to about 10% load and stays in 0% to 3% load most of the time.


    Everything was tested with subtitles turned off and automatic quality selected (although I wonder why selecting a specific quality from the extended list would change anything).

  • The gpu load is ok. The load can‘t get to higher values with only transcoding tasks. Main purpose are tasks for image calculations, rendering etc. And gpu does why you use it: it transcodes way faster (less load) than a cpu ;)


    What you could do is converting your videos to compatible codecs with a tool like dvdfab or handbrake or even with plex and the option „optimizing video“


    But I would recommend buying a used nvidia quadro p400/p600 or t400/600

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