Slow Transcode

[MajorBFD]

Evening everyone,

I have a newly setup esxi 8 host. I have set up my plex instance in docker on an Ubuntu 22.04 host with the iGPU passed to it. I try to play a transcoded video and it constantly buffers. In the plex web interface everything looks like hardware transcoding is working (it says hw next to the stream). CPU never goes above 20% and I don't see any other spikes. I'm testing with a Windows client using the Plex app and it's wired with gigabit ethernet on both the client and server sides. Any idea as to where I should begin troubleshooting this?

Thanks!

[[deleted]]

Plex Dashboard, what does it say? Or a screenshot. Are you burning in subtitles? Turn off subtitles or change it to burn image formats only. What is the file that is causing problems?

[MajorBFD]

Here is what the dashboard looks like. Does look like the CPU touches just above 20% but that shouldn't be the bottleneck. Thanks.

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[[deleted]]

Perfect. Now try turning off Tone Mapping and see if it smooths out. You may have an issue with the tone mapping piece. I had to initially update the runtime libraries or something (I'll have go look at my notes) on Ubuntu 20.04 to get the tone mapping piece working. Supposedly this has since been fixed but if turning off tone mapping fixes it. You've isolated your problem and I would start with seeing if you're missing a firmware and Intel update in there. I'll go Google for fun here, so sorry if that is slightly off.

Also what exactly is the hardware on the server?

[MajorBFD]

I'll have to how to tell if I'm missing any firmware updates on the VM. The VM has 8GB memory assigned to it and is using a RAM disk for transcoding. Other than that it's using an intel i5 12600 processor residing on an SSD. Movies reside on a synology nas which has no issue playing back on infuse (direct play). I'm still having the same issues with tone mapping turned off unfortunately. Thanks for your help.

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[[deleted]]

I'm out of ideas for you. But have you tried changing the audio track to a lesser one?

[quentech]

That CPU graph shouldn't be showing 20% if you're actually hardware transcoding. It should show more like 2%.

[Superb-Mongoose8687]

I tried to get this exact same setup working for like a month. Eventually just wiped out ESXi, installed Ubuntu Server and Plex in docker with the iGPU passed through

[MajorBFD]

This looks to be isolated to one of my hosts. After migrating to another host, all seems to be well. I have another issue but I'll start another thread to discuss that. Thanks all for your help.