spankaroo

I think I'm good now. I guess I just needed to read more... I had subtitles enabled on my tests. Transcoding with subtitles is a killer apparently. So, I can now get 4 x 4K movies HW transcoding to 8mbps and 2mpbs streams. I think that's pretty good. After doing a lot more reading I think I'll start keeping a 1080p version of all of my movies alongside the 4K copies anyway. I have pretty much the same result as you on the jellyfish tests. 45Mbps works, 50 fails. Though I notice dropped frames/stuttering when watching the jellyfish 35Mbps and higher. Not all the way through, but at certain parts.

- Tested the jellyfish at maximum. HW Transcoding confirmed and no quality issues observed.

- I changed to a generated serial and associated mac addresses - I didn't do anything with the Intel NIC and I didn't use the actual NIC mac addresses - I don't have any other video card and I have tried with and without an HDMI monitor connected. My most recent boots and tests have been done with no monitor connected. - I don't have a folder at: /usr/syno/etc/codec but I have assumed that is because I didn't install any other video streaming tools. I have installed Plex only. I admit that I skipped that part of the tutorial, simply because the folders were identified as necessary for SW encoding/transcoding. Since the folder didn't exist, I have assumed it probably gets installed with Videostation or something like that. I don't have it installed. CPU usage is much higher when I switch Plex back to software transcoding. It's down to about 13% with 1x 4K stream transcoding to 2mbps 720p. So I can confirm that HW transcoding is in action.. Unfortunately, it just pauses every so often. I just googled "jellyfish hardware transcoding deterioration" and found reference to the issues you're talking about. Will try that when I'm home tonight.

Never tried. I assumed it wouldn't work and I had several PCIE Intel NICs hanging around from various other ESXi projects in my past. Actually, I have another ESXi build right now with the same onboard NIC and I had to jump through many hoops to get that working so I just expected it wouldn't work on my Xpenology project.

Can confirm: i5 8400 coffee lake w/Asrock Z390M Pro 4 + 16GB RAM + Intel dual NIC PCIE + 104b+ 6.2.1patched to date + plex + plexpass. Transcoding is working. -- but -- I see (hw) on both decode and encode to confirm hw transcoding.. but I can't get any more than 1 stream without buffering and pauses all the time. I even get pauses every few minutes with 1 4k stream being transcoded (HEVC 31500 kbps 4k mkv transcoded to 2mbps 720p). It has 4 x 6TB WD Red drives (RAID 5 + btrfs no checksum) and 2 x 256GB Samsung SSD's (raid1 + btrfs no checksum volume2 used for transcode folder location). Don't know what to do now.