CPU usage spiked to 100%+ while using Plex conversion

thepixelgeek

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Jan 21, 2016
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Just curious if this is normal and expected?


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artlessknave

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depends a bit on what you are transcoding, but transcoding is CPU intensive, so I'm not sure what you are expecting here. Plex will only be low CPU usage if it doesn't need to do any converting.
 

thepixelgeek

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I was converting one movie to 10Mbs 1080p h.264 for TV. It only took a few minutes which I thought was fairly fast.

I just didn’t realise it was CPU intensive, or that it would be maxed out.

Thank you for the reply!
 

artlessknave

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the only way to not make it CPU intensive is to use graphics offload, but you can't do that in the freebsd version iirc
 

thepixelgeek

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the only way to not make it CPU intensive is to use graphics offload, but you can't do that in the freebsd version iirc
Makes sense. Me just being a dum dum. :p
 

pschatz100

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As has been pointed out, transcoding with Plex is CPU intensive. Depending on the source format and the playback device, you might be transcoding both video and audio streams. At the end of the day, it is the video stream that requires the most CPU. Audio streams are easier to transcode. When you play a movie, you can go to the Plex server dashboard and it will tell you whether the media is being transcoded or direct streamed.

As an experiment, you might try playing the movie on different devices. If you have a playback device that will play the media without transcoding, you should see less CPU. Over the last few years, I have updated to 4K Roku's for playback as they can handle most h.264 and many h.265 streams natively.
 
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