[Guide] Hardware Transcoding: The JDM way! QuickSync and NVENC

One question. I have an Intel Core i7-7700K CPU and an NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1070 GPU. Which would be recommended for hardware transcoding in Plex when just considering transcoding speed on a single transcode? Additionally, would a GTX 1060 be slower for transcoding?

i7-7700k is plenty and would be overkill. The GTX cards are better for use as a gaming GPU, via a regular computer or via the unraid remote gaming guide.

I just want to know which of the two is faster at transcoding. I already have those two and just have to decide if I want to use QuickSync or NVENC. I want to be able to transcode 4K HDR.

QuickSync.

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Hello All,

Long time viewer first time poster….and new Linux user at that. I have purchased my HP 290 and have installed Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 on the machine. I am struggling with mounting my windows 10 shared drive. Currently I am just trying to get the drive to mount to see if it works and then will edit the /mnt /fstab file so it will mount automatically. The idea is to try and mount the whole drive so I have access to all of the folders on there for Plex. To test I have tried the following command

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.178/j /mnt/Plex ( It then asks for a password which I put in)

I get this error:
mount error(13): Permission denied

When I check the Kern.log I have the following error:

Dec 21 15:41:54 Plex-Server kernel: [ 2113.303927] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -13

Also i have went head and tried to edit the /etc/fstab file with the following:

//192.168.1.178/j /mnt/Plex ntfs,username=“Media Server”,password=XXXXXXX,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm defaults,noatime,nofail 0 0

I then do sudo mount -a and get this:

mount: /etc/fstab: parse error at line 13 – ignored

I know i must be missing something very simple in all of this, any help would be greatly appreciated.

I just set up mine, after getting a bunch of errors and watching various youtube videos / forum posts, the following worked for me in the fstab:

//ServerIP/sharename /where/to/mount cifs username=username,password=yourpassword,iocharset=utf8 0 0

If you have spaces in your share directories, use:

/040

I also made everything lowercase as case seemed to matter.

If that doesn’t work, you can try this guide (I didnt need to do this):

[Guide] Auto-Mounting Filesystems in Linux

Need quick advice, please… My QNAP TS251 just isn’t keeping up. I want to keep the QNAP for storage but dedicate something to Plex.

My transcoding requirements are usually simply burning subtitles with an occasional transcoded stream (most of my devices support direct play), HEVC support would be a huge plus but not a requirement. I also need fast RAR decompression and repair with par files. For this, should I go with the latest generation CPU? Is i7 an overkill for this? Whatcha recommend?

Anybody know what I am doing wrong here? I set the mounts in my fstab and my movie library shows up no problem but my tv show library is not showing up at all. Screenshot below of my fstab. Any ideas?

image

Because the space in “tv shows” is being interpreted as a parameter separater.

replace the space with \040 as in tv\040shows and it should work.

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Can’t you just use an escape character?

192.168.1.2:/mnt/user/tv /mnt/tv\ shows nfs defaults,noatime 0 0

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This worked beautifully! Thank you!

Bob’s method above worked for me! Thanks JDM!

\040 is how the fstab likes it according to its man page. It just has to be different.

First of all, thank you so much for putting a guide up. This might be out of scope for this thread, and if so I’m happy to move it somewhere else, but there is a repeated warning about only using these servers as a dedicated transcode box, as additional load on the cpu (e.g. dockerized containers / *arr applications) can render chips like the g4900 useless for quicksync transcode.

I am trying to figure out if I can set up a nginx reverse proxy on this box to establish ssl without impacting transcode, or if that’s just overkill in general?

There’s no reason to use a reverse proxy with Plex.

Fair enough - the only reason I would have done that is so I can connect to plex.fqdn without specifying a port because I was trying to over-engineer things.

You can connect to https://app.plex.tv from anywhere and use your local Plex server as long as you’re logged in.

You don’t need to specify a port in the web address. Forward the single required port. and like @Mthrboard said, access via Plex TV.

Thanks again.

I should clarify that this was more of an experiment for myself instead of a standard use case for any sane person implementing this. I was just curious about how sensitive the quicksync was to other processes using cpu resources. Didn’t mean to confuse anyone.

We aren’t confused, don’t worry. A reverse proxy does not take any significant CPU resources, unlike NZB unpacking.