Keep in mind that those are experimental builds (u may see a version bump but it doesn’t necessary mean new features, and might be unstable).
Also for freebsd in particular you might need some updates on the port it self to match a few changes (assuming you use the port to update).
Still, if you want to give it a go and submit feedback on that thread, please do, I actually tested earlier versions of those builds myself and saw no issues (compared to the previous build system), also on the pro side those should also have HWT support
I’m running Plex on a FreeBSD server with no Quicksync support (Intel E5-26xx).
Now I’m thinking of buying a NVIDIA Quadro P2000 for hardware transcoding, but I’m not sure if it’s supported. Any idea? I read a lot about Linux that it doesn’t support decoding, what does that mean and is this the same for FreeBSD?
So will it be worth to add a P2000 to BSD for 4K transcoding? Or will it be a waste of money.
Btw I’m not willing to move to Windows or something lol.
To be honest in my tests only intel was support was confirmed working, so I can’t even be sure if it would work for the nvidia card , however I can confirm that for now on linux only encoding works not decoding (that’s not to say it won’t eventually work in future) however if this is just to get FreeBSD Hardware Transcoding support I think the best advice I can give is to upgrade you’re CPU and its probably going to cost you less.
But I do mean for transcoding, when using HW acceleration with intel drivers plex cab use it for both enconding and decoding, while in the nvida case (and for linux) only the decoding would leverage HW Transcoding, encoding is still using software Transcoding.
For intel no… For Linux if HWT is supported then it would use hardware decoding, but when encoding to h264 it would still be software…
If it overloads the cpu or not depends on more factors but it will still be one step better. I can’t state for sure if it will be supported in future.
What I can say is that for FreeBSD in particular it’s best to use Intel hardware if you want to use the full HWT capabilities.
It’s really not an option to replace my CPUs. I would then have to replace the mainboard and memory as well, perhaps buy an entire new server.
So I just ordered a P2000, I will see what it does under FreeBSD. If I’m not happy with the result I’ll just switch to Windows (which I would hate and is really not an option but if that works for now so be it.
I see, you could wait and see if support for encoding is added in the near future, and only buy it after if you don’t want to switch to windows just yet.
I do think eventually we would want to have full support has its a pretty nice alternative if you can afford the cpu upgrade.
Best advice I can give so far is don’t spend the money yet!
Decided to check this thread to see if there had been any good news. Unfortunately no.
Another vote for full GPU support on FreeBSD. The FreeBSD port of PMS is the way to go for NAS users since they can use FreeNAS, so it’s unfortunate to see it get so handicapped (this, the Gracenote music metadata, and so on). I have a free PCIe slot just itching for an nVidia card.
Hey @mikec_pt is QuickSync support available for FreeBSD 12 based systems. I just upgraded my XigmaNAS installation, which now uses FreeBSD 12. I note that I now have a HW transcode option in the Transcoder settings. However, I can’t tell if it’s using it or not. There’s no indication in the new dashboard. What would it look like if it were using HW transcoding?
The dashboard does show if its using hardware transcoding, you will see 720p (H.264) (hw) 720P (H264)—Transcode (hw) I.E. (notice the (hw) in the encoder/decoder, for example here it means it using Hardware Transcoding for both decoding and encoding (I actually forced transcoding here, it wasn’t needed but just to give the example)
However you might need some system config steps to enable this, and I’m not sure how it works on XigmaNAS so I’ll give you the FreeBSD base steps and you can try and see if that makes sense/works.
First even in FreeBSD12 last time I tried (and this was with one of the alpha and even RC) I needed to install “drm-fbsd12.0-kmod”.
Then a very important step is that the user running PMS must be in the video group (this would usually be plex unless you changed it), if this is not done the user won’t be able to access (/dev/dri/renderD128 (this is actually also why you need a recent drm kmod package, previous builds didn’t support this and you would simple get card0 under /dev/dri.
You should also see information in the PMS logs when HWT is supported and in use. So if after this its not working send me the logs and perhaps I can help.
No luck with the setup. I installed everything you asked my install and setup a video group with GID 44. Plex is a member of this group and I restarted the entire server to make sure everything was applied.
XigmaNAS is essentially just FreeBSD with a slew of NAS features layered onto it. It could also be some non-essentials were taken out and need to be added back. Would you be interested in my logs at all?
