N100 struggling with a single transcode
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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?
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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.
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Your transcode temp directory doesn't look right. You should use /temp or similar. Anything in /dev is a physical piece of hardware, not a partition. What Ubuntu version and kernel are you running?
This is still debatable, there are Pro's and Con's using either /temp or /dev/shm aka RAM.
I put out a small write-up for what worked with my N100 here. https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/s/KXBT8sspCE
Yeah that was just writing transcode buffer to ram
Is it running on Windows? Hardware tone mapping only works on Linux.
Nah, Ubuntu
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N100 is an Intel CPU with igpu. I mentioned Ryzen but that's irrelevant really - I'm storing data on a Ryzen based nas but Plex got migrated to the n100
Where subtitles would show on this is cut off, are you watching with subtitles? That has to be software transcoding
Nope, just cut off my username but didn't know subtitles are software transcoding only. That's good information. Some of my family members are watching with subtitles didn't know that would force it down the software transcoding route
