1.32.2.7002-86cfcc10c - Intel Hardware Transcoding Removed on FreeBSD?

Plex Media Server Plex Pass Betas
2

Unfortunately, the actual Intel userspace drivers required to provide hardware transcoding do not natively support FreeBSD. In order to provide this support, we had to apply patches maintained by the FreeBSD community. When these patches fell behind, it meant we couldn’t update to the latest versions of the drivers, which in turn meant that Linux users with newer Intel GPUs were unable to use hardware transcoding.

The number of Linux users with those newer Intel GPUs exceed the number of FreeBSD users with any Intel GPU (with kernel drivers set up for it, at least) by a sizable margin, so when given a choice between supporting one or the other, it was clear which we needed to prioritize.

If, in the future, the Intel drivers add first-class support for FreeBSD in the relevant codebases, we would be happy to re-evaluate this change. This primarily means that these two pull requests would need to be merged:

Note that the latter is currently blocked on the former.

Removing functionality on a platform is always a hard decision, and I’m very sorry that it was ultimately necessary here; we thank you for your understanding.

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