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Plex and hardware acceleration: pure awesomeness
I have a dedicated server from Hetzner Auctions that I use with Plex and other things. I discovered that I could easily enable the integrated GPU in the i7700 CPU (I only had to enable a couple of kernel modules and install an Intel driver for QuickSync) in order to enable hardware acceleration in Plex. Now I can stream in full quality 4K with almost no CPU usage 
I had to buy the Plex Pass for 119e though (lifetime license) to be able to use hardware acceleration. I got hardware acceleration working for free with Jellyfin too but with Jellyfin some formats wouldn't play and I had to use Tdarr to transcode videos in a better format, which takes time. With Plex I don't need any of this so it was worth the payment.
Does anyone here use hardware acceleration in Plex?
Comments
Just be wary of some mobos that don't pass on the quicksync from the CPU - HP ML10v2, I'm looking at you...
It’s definitely using hardware acceleration now because there is almost no cpu usage compared to before and before I couldn’t stream at 4K max quality
I do this with Emby's hardware acceleration using a Hetzner auction server that has an i7-8700, it's really nice to be able to transcode at high resolution and high speed and not have the CPU care at all. I moved from an AX41 with a Ryzen 5 3600 and while the Intel's CPU performance is slightly worse, the added flexibility of the iGPU makes up for that if you have workloads that require transcoding or hardware accelerated graphics. The server setup overall was also cheaper, so there's that too.
You are saying you "stream 4k" but if you are transcoding on the fly like that, its probably worse picture quality than getting 1080 encode in first place.
Obviously its useful if you are on the move, phone etc and wanna watch something. But in general you are way better off just getting good 1080 encodes than transcoding like that.
Can you elaborate on this?
Why are you transcoding though? If your internet connection is good enough, you should use direct play or direct stream, which needs very little CPU (even without hardware acceleration) as it doesn't transcode.