Guide: NVDEC Hardware Acceleration Patch for Plex Media Server on Linux

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
21

I just noticed, sweet!
But, why would someone want to add unsupported codecs?

Thanks anyway!

22

How would we go about using this with docker install?

3 Likes
23

I was trying to figure that out as well no luck so far

24

Iā€™ll have to give this a try

26

After applying this patch (GTX1060) My 4k content fails to transcode at all. All I see in the logs is ā€œtranscoder runner appears to have diedā€

Iā€™ve tried it with hardware accel both turned on and off in the plex settings.

27

Chris, what version of Plex are you running on the server? Note it needs to be at least version 1.15.1.791
What NVIDIA driver version? (you can check by running nvidia-smi).

28

Plex version is 1.15.3.858. My driver version shows as 418.43.

29

I found the issue. A bad bug was not applying the patch properly at first. I would recommend reinstalling Plex to restore the original Plex Transcoder file

30

This is what Iā€™ve done up to this point. Can we expect to see the fixed version in git soon? (donā€™t mean to be pushy, just trying to figure out when to try again lol)

31

I pushed a quick fix so it doesnā€™t blow up the install anymore. Working on a permanent fix. The current fix will show a binary error when running, but works fine.

EDIT: this is now fixed properly

32

I just installed it, Iā€™m getting transcoding now. Dumb question probably though. How do I know itā€™s working? Iā€™m seeing a process in nvidia-smi, but I got that same process before when enabling hardware transcoding in plex. My CPU usage is showing 320% in top for Plex Transcoder so it doesnā€™t appear to be using my GPU.

33

Chris, squashed one more bug trying to quickly fix the clobber issue. It was not enabling nvdec properly due to a debug line I had.

Newest version has that all fixed and working in my tests.

You can monitor NVDEC utilization by running ā€˜nvidia-smi dmon -s uā€™. The Dec column shows utilization of NVDEC

34

itā€™s back to telling me that the patch is already applied, reapplying wrapper script. The Plex Transcoder is still a binary file and the Plex Transcoder2 file doesnā€™t exist.

If it helps, when attempting run it with ā€œsh plex-nvdec-patch.shā€ I get the following error:
root@media:~/src/plex-nvdec# sh plex-nvdec-patch.sh
plex-nvdec-patch.sh: 4: plex-nvdec-patch.sh: Syntax error: ā€œ(ā€ unexpected

I can however execute it by making it executable and running it that way.

35

Going to reply to myself, that was a screwup on my end it looks to be working. Thank you, this is pretty amazing to be able to do!

36

Yep, itā€™s meant to run in bash and not sh. Sorry for all the bugs this morning! Should all be sorted now

37

Has anyone tried 4k decoding with this? I noticed a ton of blockiness when running a transcode from 4k to 1080, using a p2000. If I CPU decode and let nvenc encode, there is no blockiness at all.

38

Iā€™m seeing the blocks too, just figured it was the cost of doing things this way,

39

Can you provide examples? I do not see blocks on my transcodes from 4K to 1080p

40

Yep, Iā€™ll grab some screens when I get home. Just for the sake of testing, Iā€™m decoding 4k hevc HDR down to 1080p medium. What drivers are you using rev?

41

Iā€™m running a Quadro M2000 on 390.48.

One caveat I have seen is that HDR -> SDR conversions will have washed out colors due to Plex not doing any tonemapping, but I have not seen blocky artifacts.