Experimental HEVC doesn't use hardware acceleration correctly

[Flofian 3]

I had the option "Enable HEVC video encoding (experimental)" on, which did work, it used HEVC when transcoding for my android phone, and I have the option "Enable hardware acceleration when available" set to yes with no custom settings for any of the encoders.

However, it seemed to only use CPU when transcoding to hevc, and i saw the ffmpeg task with "-c:v libx265" in the arguments.

But looking at the logs, it seems to try it with hardware acceleration first, and sometimes works? I attached 3 logs,  all are for transcoding the same file.

embylog01.txt embylog02.txt embylog03.txt

[Luke 42077]

Hi, looks like those log files have been modified. We need to see the originals to answer the question.

Short answer though, it's not supported yet by all Emby apps and we are gradually rolling it out to more and more of them.

[Flofian 3]

Sure, here are all the full log files from that playback and the server log from that day. 

The problem with the encoding was not whether it was used or not, but the fact that it used the servers cpu instead of gpu. playback was all on the same device in the same app. 

ffmpeg-transcode-b654e002-01c2-4b05-b964-b270e623cf7a_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-5f5bf10e-9588-43b3-8381-55f291773bac_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-7a20c257-dda2-4625-9a14-b9c1e003caa8_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-44a34178-82ce-446d-982b-83d6e4feecfb_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-90a82035-5b1f-4000-a5b5-415cea689f1a_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-242a6028-53f4-4509-b4be-ebc20550be4b_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-2226fe78-3ad9-4ec4-bf14-ae4218a7918b_1(1).txt ffmpeg-transcode-35552def-f436-44c7-8996-615ea8e6dc10_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-565290da-51fa-4d5e-a415-97449f992d9a_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-a6d701bb-7361-4f28-adee-77858f3ae8d7_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-c1fa455f-db2c-4a21-8deb-8e1b61cf787a_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-cd16deb6-fa12-4602-b492-4df1566c5cb1_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-dce172e4-e5f6-4913-9139-cfd895a92a9e_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-5c277d58-2ff9-46ad-b8d2-21a068596da8_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-2226fe78-3ad9-4ec4-bf14-ae4218a7918b_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-bc159779-bf4c-4a60-9e52-412f5aecfd3a_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-8a43fea7-4256-4c95-9edb-752540781bb5_1.txt embyserver-63905068800.txt

[ebr 16169]

Hi.  Many of those are not using HEVC at all but the one I found that was looks to be using your GPU:

13:03:41.598   Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (h264 (native) -> hevc (hevc_nvenc))

 

[Flofian 3]

Sorry, maybe i added a few too many logs, i just wanted to show all the logs from the same file.

The logfile ffmpeg-transcode-bc159779-bf4c-4a60-9e52-412f5aecfd3a_1.txt shows this

13:06:54.672   Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (h264 (native) -> hevc (libx265))

which i think was the main one that i saw using the cpu.

I think the later logs that are not hevc are because i turned the option off. 

 

Edited January 27 by Flofian

[ebr 16169]

Okay, so what it appears happened is the stream played for a while just fine using hardware (this is the log just before the one you pointed out) and then something happened to cause it to fail:

13:04:38.611 Too many packets buffered for output stream 1:1.
13:04:38.722 Conversion failed!
13:04:38.722 EXIT

So, we re-started the stream disabling the hardware conversion (because that is many times the cause of an error) and it continued on from there.

>>>>>>  FindVideoEncoder - MediaType: hevc, UseHardwareCodecs: False, HWA-Mode: Automatic

 

[Flofian 3]

Thank you so much.

I guess there is nothing i can do about that? I understand that it makes sense for it to behave like it currently does, but since the server runs on my personal machine, it would be better (for me) if it tried to use h264 on my gpu before it switches to cpu, especially since i dont think i ever had problems wihth h264 on my gpu. I would love it if there was an option for deciding the order.

[Neminem 1518]

43 minutes ago, Flofian said:

if it tried to use h264 on my gpu before it switches to cpu

Yes try without HEVC encoding, to get the old h264 encoding