HW tone mapping kaput on Ubuntu? Which distro for a Quick Sync transcoding/tone mapping server?

Plex Media Server
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I have a 7th gen i3 box with HD630 graphics, which should be a decent Linux PMS server, able to transcode and tone map a couple of streams.

Tonight I installed Ubuntu, PMS, beignet and opencl, and got hardware accelerated transcoding… but Tautulli did not show me that hardware was engaged when I tried playing a streaming 4k HDR file at 1080p SDR. It fell back to software mode and performance was terrible.

When I looked around I found this post saying that hardware tone mapping seems to be kaput on Ubuntu 21.04.

I have no particular loyalty to Ubuntu and my test server has been running for one night. I’m perfectly happy to switch to another distro if that is the easiest way to dodge this issue.

It’s also still possible, I guess, that something is screwy with my Ubuntu config and installing the right package will fix tone mapping. But I’m not sure what that would be.

I appreciate any ideas you might have.

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21.04 hw tone mapping simply doesn’t work it seems.

Downgrade to 20.04 and try with that.

20.04 is also LTS and many more people use it so it’s more stable and you will get better support.

That’s what I did and as soon as I downgraded it worked perfectly first time.

21.04 introduces new display backend (Wayland instead of x11) and I suspect this is related

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Thanks, I will try 20.04. I thought newer was better but should have known better…

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Yup, 20.04 “just worked.” All you have to do is install Plex and the beignet / opencl packages, couldn’t be easier. Transcoding/tone mapping a 4k HDR remux to 1080p showed a minimum speed rating of 2.5 in Tautulli, sometimes much higher.

Problem solved, now I can finish setting up this box. Cool.

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Glad it worked

As for Linux, it’s not like Windows, newer isn’t ‘better’. The LTS version is the best - more stable, more support, more people using it so there’s a better set of understanding and experience. The LTS is the ‘current’ release for all the time it’s out.

In between releases (20.10, 21.04) are basically glorified beta releases where they try out new things and test everything before it gets rolled into a new LTS release. There are some positive things in there but more risk of stuff breaking. I learnt my lesson the hard way like you. I’ll stick to 20.04 until the next LTS is stable for Plex (2025 at earliest)

20.10 works fine with hw tonemapping, I know. Something’s broken in 21.04 and i’m not technical enough to work it out and Plex don’t care because few people use it. I’m almost certain it must be down to the Wayland/x11 swap changing how display drivers work on a fundamental basis.

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Ah hah, now I got it. Thanks!

Don’t need anything cutting edge for this anyway… Plex is probably all this box will ever do. If I am doing anything else unix-y I will be using FreeBSD, that’s what I know best. Sadly it has poor Plex support.

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