Help with hardware transcoding - Ubuntu / Quadro P620 GPU

[mikerbts]

Good morning,

I just did my first Linux install of PMS having previously run this on Windows. The PC I am using is a Dell 9010 which has an i7-3770 processor onboard. I have added an NVIDIA Quadro P620 to help with transcoding.

The bios for my machine only allows me to select which of the graphics cards will be primary (I have selected the NVIDIA).

When I am doing hardware transcoding it is defaulting to the intel integrated chipset which is confirmed in the logs.

transcodeHwDecoding=“vaapi” transcodeHwEncoding=“vaapi” transcodeHwDecodingTitle=“Intel (VA API)” transcodeHwEncodingTitle=“Intel (VA API)” transcodeHwFullPipeline=“1”>

I can see the usage on the intel GPU when I look at the monitor tools.

Nvidia-SMI confirms the card drivers are loaded correctly:

±----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 430.14 Driver Version: 430.14 CUDA Version: 10.2 |
|-------------------------------±---------------------±---------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0 Quadro P620 Off | 00000000:01:00.0 Off | N/A |
| 43% 51C P0 N/A / N/A | 0MiB / 1999MiB | 0% Default |
±------------------------------±---------------------±---------------------+

±----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: GPU Memory |
| GPU PID Type Process name Usage |
|=============================================================================|
| No running processes found |
±----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

I am at a loss as far as how I get the plex transcoder to use the nVidia card instead of the integrated graphics.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[pl_5309]

Plex hasn’t delivered this officially on linux just yet but:

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

UPDATE: Plex has added native support for NVDEC on Linux! This patch is now redundant and no longer needed if you are using a recent version of Plex! All, there is a pretty lengthy thread going in the feature request section of the forums to make this a native feature, but recently the PMS libraries have been updated enough to insert this support with a simple patch. I have posted a copy of a script to install a patch to enable NVDEC support on Linux at the GitHub repository below: plex-nvdec-…

[mikerbts]

Thanks for this.

I have successfully applied the patch, however it is still encoding through the intel onboard for some reason any other ideas?

[pl_5309]

Only to disable the onboard video and plug a display into the Nvidia. Dell bios’s aren’t the most configurable.

You could remove the i965-va-driver if present.

[mikerbts]

The Driver is not installed…

What I see as being loaded:
Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v2/3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: Xeon E3-1200 v2/3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 2
bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
version: 09
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: vga_controller bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
resources: irq:29 memory:f7400000-f77fffff memory:d0000000-dfffffff ioport:f000(size=64)

I am trying to just remove the i915.ko driver and see what joy I can get now.

[mikerbts]

also did a reinstall of the latest plex and re-installed the patch

[mikerbts]

SUCCESS - Removing the i915.ko driver now has plex talking to the nVidia card correctly

Thanks for your help.

[pl_5309]

If you have a Desktop installed the libraries are part of the xserver-xorg-video-intel which I guess is default loaded by Ubuntu.

Sounds like you found the solution, I know others have had the same problem.

[mikerbts]

It is Ubuntu server running in console. 18.04 version. Hopefully this will help someone else with the same problem

Cheers!