Please maintain compatibility with Kepler cards in the future

Plex Media Server
1

I’m just making this topic as a precaution because the latest builds of FFmpeg for my distribution have migrated to building with nv-codec-headers SDK version 12.0, which bumps the required NVIDIA driver from 470 to 520, effectively dropping support for hardware transcoding on Kepler series cards (listed here).

So, to the Plex team: If possible, please don’t make the same change (building Plex Transcoder with nv-codec-headers >=12) so all of us with older cards can utilising hardware transcoding!

If you need to upgrade to version 12 and above for any particular feature, please consider including a build with 11.1 to fall back on in case of the following FFmpeg error:

Driver does not support the required nvenc API version. Required: 12.0 Found: 11.1
The minimum required Nvidia driver for nvenc is 520.56.06 or newer
2

At some point old hardware needs to be discontinued. NVIDIA’s discontinued support for them, so other platforms will generally do the same.

3

NVIDIA has not discontinued support for this series, there was a 470 branch driver released 3 days ago. Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T) Display Driver | 470.199.02 | Linux 64-bit | NVIDIA

Keep in mind that for many, these older cards are the only affordable way to access hardware transcoding.

4

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5202

None of the updates since the end of 2021 have had anything outside of security updates. The ffmpeg update shows that you should be looking for another way soon.

5

The link you’ve sent is about Game Ready Drivers, not Linux drivers. If you read the release highlights for the driver I sent you’ll see none of the changes are security related.