For questions and comments about the Plex Media Server. The Plex Media Server is smart software that makes playing Movies, TV Shows and other media on your computer simple. This page is community-driven and not run by or affiliated with Plex, Inc.
N100 struggling with a single transcode
Help
I bought a mini PC with an N100 in it mainly for Plex. Data sits on a DS1821+ which has a Ryzen CPU.
Now in some scenarios I think the N100 is indeed better but sometimes it just struggles with a single stream.
An example transcode from 4K DoVi/HDR10 is just not viewable. Tried it on 2 different devices (chrome and firestick 4k) that do need the transcode. CPU sits around 100%, HW acceleration enabled and set to the iGPU.
Nothing else is being played on the server at this time.
Is the hardware not performant enough or am I missing a trick?
Sort by:
Best
Open comment sort options
Best
Top
New
Controversial
Old
Q&A
I had this problem with my N100 beelink - make sure to enable the iGPU in bios. For some reason it’s not “on” it’s set to auto or something which meant (5-6 months ago) that it didn’t work. I don’t remember the exact setting but the bios is pretty simple and you will find it.
Edit:
Chipset -> System Agent (SA) Configuration -> Graphics Configuration -> Internal Graphics
At least for beelink…
This is a great point, and I think is easily forgotten about as we expect things to work out of the box.
Are you sure it's using hardware acceleration ?
I think it should indicate (hw) next to transcode in the dashboard when it's working.
You can check if your iGPU is working with that SSH commande: intel_gpu_top
Also, do you have plexpass (required for HW transcoding) ?
Your hardware should handle HW transcoding without a sweat.
I own an Intel J5040 motherboard with a weaker CPU and iGPU than yours and I can transcode several 4KHDR to 1080pSDR at the same time.
So just for completeness, I upgraded to testing branch of Debian (13) with kernel v6.5 and it works fine so even though previous kernel upgrade showed the gpu in /dev/dri I think something was still missing for it to be utilised for transcoding
Windows? Linux? Do you have Plex Pass? From your picture you are not HW Transcoding, this is CPU transcoding.
Maybe check out some of the other posts on this exact topic...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/11vf91z/alder_lake_n100_hw_transcoding/
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/14qs9zs/does_plex_support_the_intel_n100/
I did several tests with an N100 recently, and found that any 4K source with PGS subtitles burning-in would choke the HW accelerated transcode to 1 stream. Turned off the subtitles, and the N100 can easily do 4-5 4K transcodes without issue.
Try Turing off HDR tone mapping and see if it will work. I know you said you did all the steps to make it work but I never could get it to work and once I turned it off the gpu started to transcode and I can get two 4K transcodes working.
Literally this for me. I don't know why, but this works for me. A little concerned about my friends with non HDR displays.
Whatever is supposed to be passing through the igpu doesn’t seem to be working.
I have an EQ12 with a N100 I can try this one tonight possibly.
-Try the newest Plex server beta, there were recently fixes for alder lake transcoding.
-See if Non-DOVI content works? I have had bad luck transcoding DV content.
-Delete the everything Codec folder in your plex appdata folder. Then reboot the server. This often fixes issues like that. It will redownload the codecs.
