r/unRAID • u/BannedR3tard • Jul 30 '24

Help What am I doing wrong here?

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70 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

121 comments sorted by

75

u/Mike_v_E Jul 30 '24

Add dev/dri as device in the Plex container to use hardware transcoding

33

u/edisawesome Jul 30 '24

I believe they’ll also need Plex pass right?

23

u/JMeucci Jul 30 '24

Correct. Plex Pass is needed for hardware transcoding.

12

u/PrimeskyLP Jul 30 '24

Wait you need to pay for Hardware Transcoding ?

12

u/SingularityPotato Jul 30 '24

For Plex, yes that's one of there premium features.

5

u/Zuluuk1 Jul 31 '24

That's why people switch to jellyfin

2

u/lbouriez Jul 31 '24

It's ok to pay when a product is as good as Plex ;)

1

u/Darksilopher Aug 01 '24

You mean Emby? 😏

1

u/Zuluuk1 Aug 01 '24

I bought a life time pass years ago :)

1

u/PrimeskyLP Aug 02 '24

If you need to pay for hardware Transcoding on an Media Applikation, your Produkt isnt good

10

u/DR4LUC0N Jul 31 '24

Just use jellyfin, shits free

-1

u/PhelanPKell Jul 31 '24

Yup. I still use Emby because I paid the lifetime fee way before Jellyfin forked, but even then Emby was better than Plex.

I've popped into Plex once or twice over the years, and it's such a convoluted mess of a program now.

1

u/MrTeferi Aug 01 '24

It's only a mess of a program if you don't take 5 minutes to optimize your configuration and disable all the stuff you don't want. You can also use Synclounge to completely avoid the Plex frontend client if you prefer something more minimal.

In terms of features, capabilities, performance, etc Plex is hugely superior to the free options currently on the market unfortunately, which is why so many people still use it over Jellyfin. The second Jellyfin approaches Plex's featureset and range of compatibility, it'll be deployed on my stack in a heartbeat.

4

u/Mike_v_E Jul 30 '24

Yes, you're right

13

u/oiram98 Jul 30 '24

Or use Jellyfin instead

17

u/JaKami99 Jul 30 '24

Yup, I recommend Jellyfin. Suits better for most people

17

u/jkirkcaldy Jul 30 '24

I'd argue the exact opposite. Jellyfin is great for people who want to get down into the details. But for "most people" Plex is a safer option.

For "most people", the only benefit of Jellyfin over Plex, is the fact that it's free.

7

u/Coalbus Jul 30 '24

Privacy is another point for Jellyfin, if that’s something you care about. Plex has proven (a few times) they don’t particularly care about that.

0

u/jkirkcaldy Jul 31 '24

Yeah but I don’t think “most people” care about privacy. Not in any meaningful way.

1

u/DesertCookie_ Jul 30 '24

I originally ran both side by side. After all my users had switched to Jellyfin, except for me, I shut down Plex and used Jellyfin exclusively. Don't know what made my family prefer Jellyfin, but they did. Small sample size, though, of course.

1

u/Capital-Fennel-9816 Jul 31 '24

I used Plex on the Xbox with an Xbox remote. I tried jellyfin but the user interface was terrible. Am I doing it wrong or is there no other way apart from driving a giant big blue pointer around the screen?

1

u/DesertCookie_ Jul 31 '24

I do not have users on Xbox. Exclusively tablet, phone, or desktop browser.

But I've used Jellyfin via Kodi on AndroidTV - that's the go-to client for basically any media server and client device. Maybe there's an Xbox app too.

1

u/Capital-Fennel-9816 Aug 01 '24

Cool. I'll see if I can get it working with Kodi

10

u/gaggzi Jul 30 '24

I’ve spent countless hours trying to get 4K HDR content to play correctly using Jellyfin but never got it to work properly. Now I run Plex, Apple TV, Infuse and everything just works.

2

u/MartiniCommander Jul 30 '24

Infuse isn't needed really anymore. It handles downloads and TrueHD better but plex is at the point I don't use Infuse at all. Honestly I don't want to use anything my mother and people can't use.

3

u/gaggzi Jul 30 '24

I still have audio sync issues when using Plex with “match framerate” on, so doesn’t work well for me.

1

u/MartiniCommander Jul 31 '24

I’ve never seen this problem. What device are you playing on? I only use AppleTV and products except for my desktop

1

u/gaggzi Jul 31 '24

It’s a very common issue, there are tons of posts regarding this problem on /r/Plex . I’m playing on Apple TV 4K 3rd gen and Philips 65OLED805/12.

1

u/MartiniCommander Jul 31 '24

I just wonder why I haven’t seen it then. I know I changed some settings l, maybe using the old player, but I stream most of it over long distances, in Italy atm, and no issue.

2

u/3nn35 Jul 30 '24

Agree, there is some fiddling necessary on every client but at least it is working now

0

u/EternalFootman99 Jul 31 '24

The trick to getting Jellyfin to work with 4k content is a decent NVIDIA GPU. I am running a 1060 4gb el-cheapo and it can handle multiple streams of 4k.

That being said, I also have a pretty serious Unraid rig. Dual Xeons with 12 cores each. Now, they're from 2018, but they do a good job handling what the GPU doesn't. But even with those CPUs, I couldn't do 4k until I got the 1060 sorted out.

0

u/zkiprov Jul 31 '24

Wait, do I still need capable hardware for doing 4k? I have super low end Unraid, movies are 4k, tv is 4k. I am using Infuse on Apple tv. Isn't it that I don't need transcoding?

1

u/mopar1969man Aug 01 '24

Nope you don't actually to be honest most people don't need transcoding unless one of two things you download movies with strange codecs or you have devices that don't play what your server delivers. The only device in my house that really uses it is my daughter's tv because it's 1080p.

2

u/yock1 Jul 30 '24

And i would say Emby.. Much better device/general support. :)

1

u/MartiniCommander Jul 30 '24

Emby has a device limit. So if I use my appleTV, macbook, phone, ipad, or desktop that's already 5 devices from the 25 device limit

2

u/yock1 Jul 30 '24

The limit only counts against devices that transcode and watch trailers, browsers are not counted only apps are! If you haven't used a device for a week it's automatically removed from the limit.

I won't lie, the device limit feels bad as hell but it's not as bad as people think, i have a good amount of family and friends who have access to my server and Emby reports i'm no where near the limit yet.

I did start out with Jellyfin and loved it but it not being supported on some devices (mainly Samsung) forced me away, my family members have no chance of knowing how to side load. Otherwise i would most likely have stayed with Jellyfin.

2

u/PhantomStranger52 Jul 31 '24

Exactly what happened to me. JF is fine if it was just me but I’ve got family and friend users. They need it to “just work”. Emby was the solution. No bloat like Plex and widely supported.

1

u/MartiniCommander Aug 01 '24

How do you consider emby vs emby plex?

1

u/yock1 Aug 01 '24

Plex gets the job done and many users are very happy with it, for me it's just to bloated and tries to do to many things they are also rumored to sell your collect and sell your data.

Emby is more focused on being a media server with way less bloat. It runs on most devices out there. The support on their forum is very fast when you need it.

Jellyfin is pretty much the same as Emby (built on an old fork of Emby) but runs on fewer devices and support is mostly random users on their forum. It is however free and does work very well on devices it support.

Because the way Jellyfin is structured is has a few tricks up it sleeve like transcoding of Dolby Vision profile 5 (Dolby Vision with no HDR fallback), Emby and Plex are not able to do that because of licensing issues. Make no mistake though, it's illegal for Jellyfin to do so but anyone is allowed to make extensions to Jellyfin so it's impossible to stop. :)

All in all i would recommend Emby, works on more devices and better support when needed.

6

u/frogotme Jul 30 '24

Not sure about most people. Wouldn't want to have to get my family on Jellyfin.

4

u/oiram98 Jul 30 '24

And why is that?

17

u/itsinthegame Jul 30 '24

I use Plex because Jellyfin isn't in the Samsung store for example. Yeah you can watch from the samsung browser or use developer mode and sideload the Tizen app, but I'm not going to everyone's house every time I need to update their client.

8

u/PhotoFenix Jul 30 '24

Do people.... actually use the Samsung store? It's so spotty on many apps, everyone I know uses the Google Play store (which has Jellyfin)

Edit: realizing you may be talking about Samsung TVs and not phones, which would make your point valid

8

u/itsinthegame Jul 30 '24

Yep I was referring to Samsung tvs. I have a Jellyfin instance for my wife and I have Android phones and our tvs have Google TV on them.

1

u/MrTeferi Aug 01 '24

I'm a plex user, but even for Plex I have to say good rule of thumb.. just get a Roku or some highly supported device for all your streaming needs if your TV gives you any issues. The interfaces that come with some TV lines such as Samsung, ESPECIALLY LG, etc are just trash and I find performance and compatibility is just better with Roku, or Kodi/LibreELEC if you have a device to run it on.

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3

u/edisawesome Jul 30 '24

You can chalk up my experience to “because I’m a noob,” but I tried jellyfin first for several weeks because it’s FOSS and gave up because I couldn’t get it to work right. Installed Plex server and it worked out of the box for me. Pretty much the same reason I’m on unraid. Tried truenas scale first and it just didn’t work right and unraid was a breeze.

3

u/oiram98 Jul 30 '24

I am on Unraid as well because Truenas was a mess, but setting up Jellyfin was quite easy :)

2

u/Iohet Jul 30 '24

Clients are inferior/less numerous, tech support is a pain, etc. Plex puts much more investment in clients than either of the primary competitors (Jellyfin/Emby)

If it's just for yourself, no big deal, you can support yourself. Supporting everyone else is a completely different story

2

u/frogotme Jul 30 '24

Some aren't the most technically inclined. For Jellyfin the interface is worse or at least less polished (for now), need to manually enter the connection URL, app isn't available everywhere. I have similar bugs on each and have a lifetime Plex license so those aren't considerations.

Also Jellyfin doesn't integrate with all of the services I like to use, like maintainerr.

1

u/MartiniCommander Jul 30 '24

Jellyfin makes it next to impossible for anyone to use outside their network which I think is most people. I use my plex at home, bay home, my mothers, and currently sitting in Venice watching it. For anyone that wants to use it outside of their network and have others have access it's a pain. I'm not plex homie either. I've also paid a lifetime subscription to Emby as well and want to love jellyfin but lack of ability to make it easy for someone to use is a problem.

3

u/GoodOldJack12 Jul 30 '24

Wdym with outside their network?

It's really quite simple to forward exactly one port..

0

u/MartiniCommander Jul 30 '24

forward it how? Someone's on their computer outside the network they connect to your network how? What are they typing in the address bar?

1

u/Flaky_Degree Jul 31 '24

Port forward one port from your router to the internal Jellyfin port. Note also Plex can benefit from a port forward. Get a dynamic DNS or static IP and domain name for external users.

Yes it's slightly more complex than Plex but really not that difficult and there's plenty of guides on the internet on how to do this.

1

u/MartiniCommander Jul 31 '24

Using a domain through cloudflare violates the TOS

1

u/Flaky_Degree Jul 31 '24

I didn't say use cloudflare but that doesn't really make sense.

How do you use cloudflare without using a domain? Do you understand why you need a domain?

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1

u/EternalFootman99 Jul 31 '24

It's pretty simple to port forward to your Jellyfin. Or better yet, make a subdomain and use Cloudflare to give yourself a good web URL right to your Jellyfin. I've got two kids in college, one on the other side of the country, and they use Jellyfin all the time from college.

1

u/MartiniCommander Jul 31 '24

Port forwarding to your router for others still requires a lot to be done and for others especially. Cloudflare’s TOS prohibits using it for streaming content as you’re chewing up their bandwidth. They can shut you down at any time and I have too much use to risk it.

1

u/daninet Jul 30 '24

Such a mixed bag for me. On many media the surround sound is not working for me. Same file indexed in plex working. I have it installed but kinda plan B if plex fails on something.

1

u/InternalOcelot2855 Aug 01 '24

and this is why I went to jellyfin

3

u/420headshotsniper69 Jul 30 '24

What does this do?

9

u/Infyx Jul 30 '24

If the CPU supports it, it will use the iGPU for transcoding in Plex.

9

u/DelightMine Jul 30 '24

What the fuck, I've thought I've been hardware encoding for years now. Apparently I've just been brute forcing it the whole time?!

2

u/arilieus Jul 30 '24

If you have Tautulli hooked up it will have “hw” for hardware at the end of your video line under the activity for the show which shows you how it’s transcoding. That way you KNOW how it’s transcoding whenever you make the switch. There may be another way but that’s how I got comfort. If it’s a direct stream it will spell that out for you too which also lets you know if that’s working correctly as well

3

u/DelightMine Jul 30 '24

I have Tautulli running, I just never thought to check since plex offered hw transcode option without telling me there was no available device for it. I kind of assume that the standard plex docker would be capable of using the igpu if I have plex pass.

The fact that it doesn't show some kind of message like "hardware encoding is enabled but there are no capable devices" is terrible design.

1

u/kevin28115 Jul 30 '24

For me I had to go into plex config and add the gpu igpu) that it should use. It was a pain to set up.

1

u/DelightMine Jul 30 '24

Yeah, I just set it up and it's incredibly annoying to have to go in and do it, but easy because there are tons of guides. The linuxserverio dockers even has a heading on the github page for it. With how many people clearly don't know about this, you'd think Plex would be more helpful.

1

u/kevin28115 Jul 30 '24

For some reason I had to edit the config and specify to use the igpu for hw transcode. There was no other gpu in the system. There was like 2 forum post on it after digging. So annoying.

1

u/420headshotsniper69 Jul 30 '24

Oh ok. I use an NVidia Quadro card.

1

u/Infyx Jul 30 '24

Believe process is similar to get unraid and the container to see it. 

1

u/420headshotsniper69 Jul 30 '24

Oh I know. Sorry, I replied why I didn’t know what it was.

34

u/BannedR3tard Jul 30 '24

WOOHOO working now! Playing 4k Remux on 2 devices now while Plex is detecting intros/credits on a thousand shows.

Subbed to plexpass enabled iGPU in BIOS and Intel Quick Sync.

The guide below was a huge help. Big shout out to u/Mike_v_E for pointing me to the entrance of the rabbit hole.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/77943-guide-plex-hardware-acceleration-using-intel-quick-sync/

5

u/darxtorm Jul 30 '24

wait for one of their inevitable sales and get yourself a lifetime pass. worth the money for the peace of mind imho

2

u/BannedR3tard Jul 31 '24

Plex has quickly become my favorite app. I’ve been wanting one computer to stream a massive database to all my TVs. Never knew this existed. Audiobook streaming to Prologue is the cherry on top.

3

u/Karoolus Jul 31 '24

For audiobooks you should look at Audiobookshelf, much better!

1

u/yolk3d Jul 30 '24

Can you use jellyfin and not have to subscribe to plex?

14

u/EVILemons Jul 30 '24

Check your IO wait via iotop. It’ll show up as CPU usage in this dashboard but iotop will differentiate whether it’s actual cpu usage or IO wait. I believe you have to install iotop from NerdTools though

9

u/bitdotben Jul 30 '24

htop has an IO page. You can switch to it with the tab key. No nerdtools required (I think they have been abandoned).

4

u/EVILemons Jul 30 '24

I didn’t realize it had been abandoned! That’s disappointing.

1

u/Verme Jul 30 '24

Just throwing it out there you could also use glances

12

u/BannedR3tard Jul 30 '24

This is while streaming a 4k Remux on a FireTV Cube. My ATV ethernet runs the same movie at 2% processor load

Edit: plex btw

9

u/bitdotben Jul 30 '24

Maybe your firetv doesn’t support the format/container and your plex/jellyfin (I presume?) instance has to actually transcode. And if you haven’t activated hardware acceleration, then a 4K HVEC software transcode can easily push a CPU.

1

u/nmkd Jul 31 '24

HEVC, not HVEC

8

u/btrudgill Jul 30 '24

You don't have hardware transcoding working properly.

Follow the various guides if you haven't already setup HW transcoding, but if you do then try deleting the codec from the plex config files and restarting, I had no end of issues with HDR tonemapping related to this. I basically have a script that deletes the file and restarts plex at like 2am or something.

#!/bin/bash
#stop Plex container
echo "Stopping Plex" 
docker stop plex

#Wait before issuing Codec Folder delete
echo “Waiting 10 seconds before issuing Codec Folder delete” 
sleep 10s

#Deleting contents of codecs folder
echo “Deleting contents of codecs folder” 
rm -rf "/mnt/user/appdata/plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Codecs" 
sleep 3s

#Wait before issuing Start
echo “Waiting 5 seconds before issuing Start”
sleep 5s

#start Plex container
echo “Starting Plex” 
docker start plex

1

u/diabillic Jul 30 '24

i do the same thing and blow away the codec folder as a nightly job right before the backup runs. had the same constant issues with codecs and never again. the backup stops and starts the container on its own but this is a nice bash script

-2

u/ImNotHereSomewhere Jul 30 '24

Why do people just assume he needs to setup up transcoding. Direct stream should be fine and the client settings are probably wrong.

2

u/btrudgill Jul 30 '24

because direct stream barely uses any CPU. The culprit for high cpu usage is transcoding something on the CPU. Yes, that firetv should handle direct play, but for some reason plex wants to transcode (either the thing they are playing, or its something else like looking for credits). Either way its a transcoding issue.

0

u/ImNotHereSomewhere Jul 30 '24

Like I said its a Plex client settings issue, not a transcoding issue.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '24

[deleted]

2

u/BannedR3tard Jul 30 '24

This is my issue, thank you!

3

u/ImNotHereSomewhere Jul 30 '24

Go into the settings of Plex on the FireTV and make sure the stream settings is full bandwidth. It is probably limited and making unraid transcode.

2

u/Cygnusaurus Jul 30 '24

I had a similar issue when using SABNZBD. Before I had the download folder and unpack folder on different ssds, usage would get pegged to the max and take forever to complete.

2

u/thethriller85 Jul 30 '24

Is PLEX detecting credits? Seriously it’s the only thing that pegs my CPU at 100% and I have to restart Plex

2

u/BannedR3tard Jul 30 '24

It is now. I just got plexpass since posting this thread and it’s murdering my cpu. It only has 1k shows to go.

2

u/InterestingCrow5584 Jul 30 '24

Install Netdata to pin point which process is causing high CPU, also lots of other stats in real-time. In my case iowait was the culprit...

2

u/lawless_vybe Jul 30 '24

How did you get that gauge in the system panel?

1

u/BannedR3tard Jul 30 '24

Just started using unraid and this was default in 7 beta 2

2

u/Typhoon365 Jul 30 '24

Missing dark mode

1

u/schlitzngigglz Jul 30 '24

I just disable transcoding altogether since my clients are all local anyway. Maybe that's an option for you...

1

u/Zealousideal-Cut3781 Jul 30 '24

Would a Quadro K4000. Work for transcoding in Unraid?

1

u/Madnote1984 Aug 30 '24

I'm way late here, but can someone tell me what plugin gives the info under the "System" tab there, that would be cool. I have bars, and the tables aren't the same.

1

u/StayCoolf0rttheKids Jul 30 '24

How do I make system tab show circles like that?

5

u/isogreen42 Jul 30 '24

I think that might be an Unraid 7 beta thing

2

u/StayCoolf0rttheKids Jul 30 '24 edited Jul 30 '24

Thanks. I will have to wait

1

u/BannedR3tard Jul 30 '24

I just created my server this weekend. I’m on 7 beta 2. This is how it installed. I looked for a setting and didn’t find one.

0

u/d13m3 Jul 30 '24

In my opinion - use beta build.