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?

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.

More replies

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.

More replies

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

More replies

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.

More replies

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.

More replies

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.

More replies

-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.

More replies