Hey. Wanted to drop this off here just in case someone has ever experienced the same issue I did in recent months.
The problem was simply that starting a Ripbot encode did NOT trigger the startup of any EncodingServers. The client window appears, and four (which is what I use) EncodingServer.exe instances appear as tasks, but their WINDOWS do not appear and work does not commence. It was the absolute most frustrating thing for me and I tried dozens of things to try and fix it. I have a few other machines here and on each of those, the EncodingServer app would start fine. But it simply wouldn't on my main desktop. I read about something like this in previous posts on this thread and have tried reinstalling the VC redistributables, it did not help at all. Tried clean boots via msconfig and all of a sudden EncodingServer started working again and that's when I knew it was something I was running that was preventing proper operation.
By a process of elimination I have discovered that two Nvidia services kill the ability for EncodingServer.exe to bring up a window and/or commence work.
- NVIDIA Display Container LS (this is the prime culprit)
- NVIDIA LocalSystem Container
I have a Ryzen 9 3950X (but had an I7 4-core before, same issue) and a GTX1080. The services above appear to be related to the nVIDIA GeForce experience app that is installed by default with the GeForce drivers. I messed around in there with settings but absolutely could not fix this without completely stopping and disabling those services. Soon as I did, boom, up came all four windows for EncodingServer.
FWIW I also think that I had problems with my browser (Brave) at one point, but I changed a lot of flags in there and now there are no issues with EncodingServer, even with Brave running. I can only imagine that there is something related to the GPU perhaps, that when in operation somehow jams up EncodingServer's functionality.
Running the NVIDIA Display Container LS, over time, also seemed to spin up some sort of weird background process, making my mouse pointer sluggish to animate and move over time. Stopping that process instantly gave me back pointer responsiveness, however it also kills off the GeForce experience app from my systray. I'm fine with that.
Regards
Dhry