"This server is not powerful enough to convert video." Yesterday it played well

guermantes

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- "Playback Error. This server is not powerful enough to convert video."
- Seriously? I was watching this very episode yesterday and many others from the same season without problem, in the same browser.

I have just got into Plex and am using the current official Freenas plugin with Plex Version 4.34.4, no plexpass, just within my LAN and in the browser. 11.3-U1, Intel i3-6100 and 16 GB RAM. After install I put as much as I could to maximum and it worked great for a few days, but today I am running into the above problem.

I don't understand why Plex suddenly wants to transcode? I am using the recommended "home streaming" setting where the media is just transferred to the client as is if it is playable by the client. It's an oldish xvid/avi 352p resolution so it really isn't heavy or anything. I saw somewhere this this combo can be problematic.... but I was watching it yesterday!?!?

I also have other episodes from other series that are half-played, where Plex asks me whether to start from the beginning or resume playback where I left of (super-proof that Plex has played this file before) but whichever I select Plex complains that the server is not powerful enough to convert the video.

What might be going on here?

Quality I have tried both to set and unset the "automatically adjust quality" setting.
"Transcoder quality" is set to Automatic.
 

guermantes

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Okay, bear with me on this one, because I solved it and it’s weird…

I installed a second instance of the PMS plugin. I did not configure anything and it played the files perfectly that in the first install had played well at first but then started requiring "beef to convert".

I tried to think what was different. I realized that I in the web browser javascript blocker had allowed javascript connections to gstatic.com and plex.tv. Could that really be it?

I went ahead and blocked access… and boom, error message and transcoding was no longer possible.

So I re-allowed those domains and went back to the first Plex instance and verified if I could now play the files there since those two domains were allowed. And boom… the files transcode and play well.

What the yuck is going on here?

Addendum:
Now I cleaned the cache, restarted browser and revisited my first plex install. Javascript blocker again active and blocking the two domains. And yet it plays and transcodes the files in question. So unblocking was needed to remove getting the error thrown at me, but not needed once it works again. Go figure. Plex reminds me of Wacom; great product, market dominance, but weird and misbehaving code.
 
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bigdadydwarf

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i dunno if you've experienced this
This server is not powerful enough to convert video”

but ive googled all day and got squat.
i finally figured out how to fix it

on the viewing end go to settings. increase bandwidth to at least 12mbp from the minimum or 2mb whatever it's set to.
when my sis in NY is logged in she gets this message but i can view fine from my end.
the problem lies if im sending you a 12mb/s video file but your only allowing 2mb/s then it's not gonna work

so increase your viewing bandwidth
 

jgreco

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i dunno if you've experienced this
This server is not powerful enough to convert video”

but ive googled all day and got squat.
i finally figured out how to fix it

on the viewing end go to settings. increase bandwidth to at least 12mbp from the minimum or 2mb whatever it's set to.
when my sis in NY is logged in she gets this message but i can view fine from my end.
the problem lies if im sending you a 12mb/s video file but your only allowing 2mb/s then it's not gonna work

so increase your viewing bandwidth

That's not really "fixing" it. It's making it so that the server doesn't need to convert (transcode) the video.

There are four basic fixes to the problem.

1) Make it so that transcoding is unnecessary. This can either be making sure that the upstream bandwidth for the server and downstream bandwidth for the client is able to sustain the necessary transfer rate, or you can use Handbrake etc. to recode a video to a more manageable size. Either way, the server no longer has to do work and can directly stream the data to the client.

2) Have a CPU that has the Intel QuickSync capabilities to do basic hardware decoding and encoding. This means software transcoding doesn't happen, it is done in hardware instead.

3) Have a GPU that allows Plex to do transcoding on the GPU. Unfortunately AFAIK this is mostly limited to Linux for ${reasons}

4) Don't watch large videos :smile:
 

sretalla

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I had been having reports of this increasing in recent version updates (TrueNAS and Plex).

I seemed to be able to eliminate it (mostly) by allocating a RAMdisk for transcode.

The "trouble" with that is that you need to make the RAMdisk as big as or even a little bigger than the largest media file in your library if you want to be able to transcode without restriction. (a little over 32GB for me)

To make this happen, I set a Pre-Init task with this line of code as the command:
mkdir /mnt/RamDisk && mdmfs -M -S -o async -s 36864m md10 /mnt/RamDisk && chown plex:plex /mnt/RamDisk/ && chmod 0775 /mnt/RamDisk

Then I mount that in my plex jail and set that location as the Temporary Transcode location.

It gets scratched and recreated on every boot of the server, so don't expect to find anything in there as you start up.

EDIT: just as an additional note, I was using an NVME SSD as the transcode location before that, so it wasn't a case of slow access.
 

jgreco

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That's only going to work as long as the disk doesn't fill; two transcodes of large items will fill the disk.

I wonder why NVMe wasn't working out.
 

joeschmuck

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LOL, this was a pretty old thread brought out because someone wanted to say that they don't use Plex anymore. Also, the OP only had 16GB RAM, while I would think that would be enough, this was also in the early days of TrueNAS 12 (November 2020) and you know it was a bit problematic with many thing, not saying it was the culprit but we don't know.
 

jgreco

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someone wanted to say that they don't use Plex anymore.

No, a spammer was trying to redirect you to their crappy software site. I deleted the link though, so admittedly there is some missing context. :smile:

Something else came to me, another issue I've seen is that if you have a file where the audio and video are not correctly synchronized, you can get really crappy behaviour from ... I'm guessing the client ... where it is constantly disconnecting and reconnecting even though it is set for direct play. This is the "32 - Broken pipe" problem which is easily spotted because the PMS log gets spammed with that every second or so, and the console shows a rapid toggling in and out of "Buffering" mode.

Basically a variation on this thread on the Plex forums.

The kicker is, if you turn transcoding ON, and do NOT direct play, it all starts working fine. As noted in the Plex forum thread, this is basically signalling an encoding problem, and usually this can be resolved by hitting the file up with mkvtoolnix and remux the file.

Just a reminder, test your files in multiple modes on multiple devices. Direct play, transcode, subtitles, on all your clients...
 
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guermantes

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I few months down the line I have received this by PM:

"Hello, i know it sounds weird, but I need to thank you for the solution of " "This server is not powerful enough to convert video." Yesterday it played well ". I literally just created an account for this XD. I installed NoScript a few weeks ago and couldn't get Plex to work. I wondered how it would be possible that the trusty Ryzen 9 3950X can't transcode a simple anime. Deactivating NoScript on Plex solved it. "

So also do look over your JS settings if you run into this problem.
 
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