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Hardware transcode sessions limit on GPU fail back to CPU in emby?


chef

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lightsout

 

Now I'm wondering if this is even worth it..

 
This morning's discussion:
 
Wife: "Why are there commercials in this show?"
Me: "Because it's recorded but if you press the up button you can choose the next chapter to skip them all" [i used to use MCEBuddy to strip commercials but had a bunch of content truncated and chopped out so now I only create chapters for easy skipping in Emby to alleviate her prior complaint.]
Wife: "That's too much, I'm not going to do that."
Me (under my breath): "UGH"
 
LOL
 
So maybe I don't need a GPU after all if I just quit using MCEBuddy! But I use the chapters all the time so NO!

 

Lol wives just don't get it ha. 

 

So you're better off with more vRAM than cores?

 

That seems to be a pretty nice find there, (Whiteboy714)! Thanks!

You want both, its just that 3gb can be filed up quick. I think either will do the job.

 

Check out this link, its a master list off all nvidia gpu's and their capabilities. You'll want to use it from a desktop PC.

https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding

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Sammy

Here's the link to the hack.

 

https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch

 

I use it on win 10 not sure about win 7.

 

That card should be alright. If you can swing the 1060 6gb it's quite a bit better card. Not just the ram but processing power.

 

They also have a single fan model. Then again I have a 1050ti 4gb in my server and it suits me well. I got it for the same reason you mention. When using MCE buddy and other software my CPU cycles were getting eaten up.

 

I also use handbrake and allow the GPU to do the encoding. Gets like 150fps.

 

So I just grabbed that 1060 6GB from @ and am ready to go with this. There's an Aug 20 driver from eVGA and nVidia available. I'm wondering if I should go with an older driver as sometimes manufacturer's will disable hacks if they don't want you using them. Any thoughts?

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lightsout

So I just grabbed that 1060 6GB from @ and am ready to go with this. There's an Aug 20 driver from eVGA and nVidia available. I'm wondering if I should go with an older driver as sometimes manufacturer's will disable hacks if they don't want you using them. Any thoughts?

On the git page for the hack it shows which drivers are working, I just downloaded the most recent one that was supported. And I download straight from nvidia always.

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx

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chef

Sammy how did you fair getting the hack to work on windows 7? I'm dying to know.

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Sammy

I am still massaging and tweaking Emby and MCEBuddy to play nicely together and haven't done it yet. Frankly, it seems a little bit involved so I need to set aside more time to digest what needs to be done before diving in.

I have set Emby Server to software decode MPEG2. Then in AndroidTV I set LiveTV for direct stream. I noticed that the server is not transcoding LiveTV ts but it is giving me closed captions on AndroidTV which is awesome! Next I'm going to flip back to hardware transcoding MPEG2 and test again on Android TV.

Next I noticed that MCEBuddy was not using the GTX 1060 to process conversions. After a little bit of research on the MCEBuddy forums, I discovered I needed to make a change in one of the configuration files for MCEBuddy to force ffmpeg over HandBreak to engage the GTX 1060. I then set MCEBuddy to only use two of my four cores. This dropped CPU usage to between 50% and 70% in Resource Monitor even though I increased MCEBuddy to convert two files at the same time. This setup seems to work pretty well with GPU usage showing 20% or less for the GTX 1060 in HWMonitor.

All that said, I don't know if I need to do the hack or not. I will monitor things going forward and decide later. I need to set up a situation with three or more transcodes occurring simultaneously with a MCEBuddy conversion. Typically I only have one to maybe three transcodes going at the same time anyhow.

Sent from my SM-G960U1 using Tapatalk

Edited by Sammy
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Diedrich

 

 

Next I noticed that MCEBuddy was not using the GTX 1060 to process conversions. After a little bit of research on the MCEBuddy forums, I discovered I needed to make a change in one of the configuration files for MCEBuddy to force ffmpeg over HandBreak to engage the GTX 1060. I then set MCEBuddy to only use two of my four cores. This dropped CPU usage to between 50% and 70% in Resource Monitor even though I increased MCEBuddy to convert two files at the same time. This setup seems to work pretty well with GPU usage showing 20% or less for the GTX 1060 in HWMonitor.

Hi there. I also use MCEBuddy (with Comskip). What was the configuration file change to utilize the GPU? Thanks in advance!
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Sammy

Take a look here. The configuration file you need is in ProgramFiles/MCEBuddy and you'll need notepad++ to edit it.

 

Sent from my SM-G960U1 using Tapatalk

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lightsout

I am still massaging and tweaking Emby and MCEBuddy to play nicely together and haven't done it yet. Frankly, it seems a little bit involved so I need to set aside more time to digest what needs to be done before diving in.

 

I have set Emby Server to software decode MPEG2. Then in AndroidTV I set LiveTV for direct stream. I noticed that the server is not transcoding LiveTV ts but it is giving me closed captions on AndroidTV which is awesome! Next I'm going to flip back to hardware transcoding MPEG2 and test again on Android TV.

 

Next I noticed that MCEBuddy was not using the GTX 1060 to process conversions. After a little bit of research on the MCEBuddy forums, I discovered I needed to make a change in one of the configuration files for MCEBuddy to force ffmpeg over HandBreak to engage the GTX 1060. I then set MCEBuddy to only use two of my four cores. This dropped CPU usage to between 50% and 70% in Resource Monitor even though I increased MCEBuddy to convert two files at the same time. This setup seems to work pretty well with GPU usage showing 20% or less for the GTX 1060 in HWMonitor.

 

All that said, I don't know if I need to do the hack or not. I will monitor things going forward and decide later. I need to set up a situation with three or more transcodes occurring simultaneously with a MCEBuddy conversion. Typically I only have one to maybe three transcodes going at the same time anyhow.

 

Sent from my SM-G960U1 using Tapatalk

I see no reason to not do the hack. Everyone has their own preference, but for me it opens up options like remote connecting to Emby. Never know how many streams might get going and need to be transcoding.

 

Glad you are getting it to your liking though. Keep us posted. 

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Sammy

Oh I most likely will but need a bit of time to digest it a bit. It isn't the only fire needing tending! LOL!

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Diedrich

Take a look here. The configuration file you need is in ProgramFiles/MCEBuddy and you'll need notepad++ to edit it.

 

Sent from my SM-G960U1 using Tapatalk

Thank you!
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lightsout

Oh I most likely will but need a bit of time to digest it a bit. It isn't the only fire needing tending! LOL!

I hear you. The hack itself is simple. Just a file that gets replaced if I remember correctly. It's not even a custom driver just an overwritten file.

 

But it sounds like you have MCE buddy automatically triggering handbrake, is that true?

 

I was trying a while ago to get handbrake to watch my DVR for and encode everything with a certain profile but it doesn't have this feature.

 

Are you doing this somehow or did I miss something?

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Sammy

I have MCEBuddy set up to monitor my RecordedTV Folder on a SSD, scan for commercials and mark them as Chapters with CommSkip, then compress them from *.ts to *.mkv and move them to a large spinner drive. Emby then recognizes these as Chapters and gives it a marker and screen grab in the *.bif file. One merely presses the up directional button to see the chapters then the right directional button to skip over the commercials. I do this because CommSkip was truncating big chunks of my files and they were gone forever, creating a low WAF. This is much better as nothing is ever chopped out and can still be watched.

 

Out of the box, MCEBuddy uses HandBrake for the compression but HandBrake won't use the GPU, instead relying on software transcoding in the CPU. Changing the order of precedence for transcoding to ffmpeg as posted above moves this to hardware transcoding on the GPU.

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lightsout

I have MCEBuddy set up to monitor my RecordedTV Folder on a SSD, scan for commercials and mark them as Chapters with CommSkip, then compress them from *.ts to *.mkv and move them to a large spinner drive. Emby then recognizes these as Chapters and gives it a marker and screen grab in the *.bif file. One merely presses the up directional button to see the chapters then the right directional button to skip over the commercials. I do this because CommSkip was truncating big chunks of my files and they were gone forever, creating a low WAF. This is much better as nothing is ever chopped out and can still be watched.

 

Out of the box, MCEBuddy uses HandBrake for the compression but HandBrake won't use the GPU, instead relying on software transcoding in the CPU. Changing the order of precedence for transcoding to ffmpeg as posted above moves this to hardware transcoding on the GPU.

Ok so it doesn't actually use the handbrake GUI but does so in the background. I have always figured MCEbuddys encoding process was inferior. But would be nice just to have it done on its own. I will see if I can import the cmd line from my handbrake settings to MCEbuddy, thanks man.

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Sammy

MCEBuddy uses HandBrake or ffmpeg, which I think is fine. If you figure out how to force HandBrake to use the GPU, let me know and I'll give it a whirl but this seems to work for me right now. I'll see how the encodes look after making this change.

 

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming! LOL

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lightsout

MCEBuddy uses HandBrake or ffmpeg, which I think is fine. If you figure out how to force HandBrake to use the GPU, let me know and I'll give it a whirl but this seems to work for me right now. I'll see how the encodes look after making this change.

 

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming! LOL

So I messed around and got things working with ffmpeg and nvidia. But I notice handbrake has more settings for deinterlacing. Not sure if that is done properly with the ffmpeg settings available in the profile.txt. 

Any thoughts on this?

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Sammy

I haven't seen jagged edges but will look out for them now that ffmpeg has been commissioned the job. I think most TV's take care of the de-interlacing when it is needed anyhow, no?

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lightsout

Usually when you do an encode to x264/265 you deinterlace the video and make it progressive. Looks like this is already happening. 

 

Without it I was getting poor performance with emby, skipping around in a video was much slower and some devices had to transcode. 

 

I am getting things sorted. But the quality settings seem a lot different than handbrakes version of h265nvenc. The same number between standalone handbrake and this result in file sizes that are much different.

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lightsout

I have changed the quality in the text file from 28 down to 20, and I always get a file size that is the same and a bitrate of 2000. I haven't figured it out yet but something 

is setting a target bitrate. I unchecked "optimize video" to see if that does something.

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Sammy

Ahh.. I just go to h.264 but maybe now I can push *.ts transcodes to h.265. Of course that'll probably start to show up in watching video on Emby while the file is being compressed.

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lightsout

Ahh.. I just go to h.264 but maybe now I can push *.ts transcodes to h.265. Of course that'll probably start to show up in watching video on Emby while the file is being compressed.

I have been doing 265, I am fine with 264 honestly, trying that now, at least in the 264 High Quality MKV profile I can see that the bitrate is set to 1800k. In the MKV HEVC profile I don't see a way to change it but it is there for sure.

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Sammy

For TV Shows I'm good with Normal Quality mkv frankly but I'd like to save even more space!

 

1800k is a pretty low bit rate but it looks fine so I've never checked . What is it in hevc?

 

Sent from my SM-G960U1 using Tapatalk

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lightsout

Idk whats going on but in 264 and 265 I always get a 2000 bitrate and a 500mb file (30 min show) Something is overiding my quality settings, posted at the mce forum and asked whats up.

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