HP Microserver Gen8 - Hardware and Software Acceleration Help

[serdar13]

Hi guys, I have been searching the forums and was cannot find what i am looking for. Basically I have a Microserver Gen8 with a a Xeon E3 1265L v2 processor and a Nvidia Quadro P1000 and wanted to know how to get Hardware and Software acceleration working for transcoding purposes when i use Emby. I have been testing DSM 6.2.3_25426 (DS3615xs) and all seems good but before i upgrade my drives from DSM 5.2 wanted to test acceleration.

 

Should i be using a different loader/version of DSM e.g DS918+ ?

How do i get the /dev/dri folder people mention?

Any help or a link in the right direction would be great.

Edited June 2, 2020 by serdar13

[flyride]

Short answer is - you are unlikely to be able to do hardware transcoding with that hardware.

 

Hardware transcoding requires a processor support Intel Quicksync, and the software stack, from the OS (DSM) to the application, have to support the same. When you boot up with compatible hardware on a DSM with a software driver, /dev/dri will appear.

 

The only DSM OS that supports the transcoding software driver on your CPU is 6.1.x on DS916+ and nobody has done any real development on that processor, plus there is no upgrade path.

DS3615xs has no OS software driver for hardware transcoding.  DS918+ has the support, but your CPU is too old to run it.

 

This table will help with your decision, but personally I think you are already using the software and features with 6.2.3 and DS3615xs that you should be with that motherboard and processor, and not to try and use hardware transcoding.

[serdar13]

Flydrive, thanks for confirming what I assumed.

If i did use for example DSM 6.1.7 for DS916+ then would this version of DSM support my CPU and GPU?

If so, how great would it be? I know there is no further support for DS916+ but i am still using DSM 5.2-5967 Update 9 for ages now and instead of jumping to 6.2.3 i could just use 6.1.7 if it meets my needs.

[flyride]

All I can say is try it and see, test the install for hardware transcoding like you did with everything else.  To my recollection, few used the DS916+ image since by the time folks really got it working, 6.2.x, DS918+ and Jun's new loaders were available and so they went to those.

 

IMHO transcoding is overrated, mostly people want to watch on their TV and a mobile device.  Download or rip the version of the media that your streamer will handle directly, and then use your PC to encode the small screen version if you need it, and then always Direct Stream and it's no problem.

[serdar13]

I direct stream with all devices at home but I would like my dad to see some movies too so is reliant on lower quality streams as he will be accessing my library over the internet.

I will try out DS916+ but i am not expecting much so therefore will sell the GPU and thus use my processor within its limits.

[haldi]

if it's only one stream Software encoding via raw CPU power shouldn't be an issue.

I often convert x265 media to x264 for my old Tablet, in 1080p realtime.

Same cpu btw.

[IG-88]

On 6/2/2020 at 1:39 PM, serdar13 said:

Hi guys, I have been searching the forums and was cannot find what i am looking for. Basically I have a Microserver Gen8 with a a Xeon E3 1265L v2 processor and a Nvidia Quadro P1000 and wanted to know how to get Hardware and Software acceleration working for transcoding purposes when i use Emby. I have been testing DSM 6.2.3_25426 (DS3615xs) and all seems good but before i upgrade my drives from DSM 5.2 wanted to test acceleration.

 

On 6/2/2020 at 4:39 PM, flyride said:

Short answer is - you are unlikely to be able to do hardware transcoding with that hardware.

 

lets assume the unlikely is possible now - how to test it? (plex needs a license i dont have, i guess jellyfin docker would be a option, but i never used this before, any test i could do with ffmpeg?)

the driver i use is good up to pascal gpu's so gtx 1050/1060/1070/1080 will work, gtx 1650/1660 aka volta/turning will not, the mentioned P1000 would be supported

i tested this with 3615 for now, but 3617 will work for sure as it uses the same kernel and 918+ should do too i guess as i'm using the same driver source synology used for its "DVA - Deep Video Analyse" diskstation DVA3219 and the deverton unit also uses kernel 4.4.x as 918+ does, to make it easy going i took the same driver and the nvidia (lib) package synology has in store so the only thing i have to care about are the kernel modules for now, the rest is a premade package

 

ash-4.3# /usr/bin/nvidia-smi -pm 1
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:01:00.0.
All done.


2020-06-14T23:58:45+02:00 ds3615_test kernel: [  309.081965] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module  381.22  Thu May  4 00:55:03 PDT 2017 (using threaded interrupts)
2020-06-15T00:00:40+02:00 ds3615_test kernel: [  423.944582] NVRM: Persistence mode is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please use nvidia-persistenced instead.


/dev/nvidia0
/dev/nvidiactl


/proc/devices
195 nvidia-frontend
245 nvidia-uvm
246 nvlink_core

/proc/driver/nvidia/gpus/0000:01:00.0/information
Model:           GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
IRQ:             145
GPU UUID:        GPU-6426fb5c-58b1-adf5-4218-7927c6daf10d
Video BIOS:      86.07.39.00.76
Bus Type:        PCIe
DMA Size:        47 bits
DMA Mask:        0x7fffffffffff
Bus Location:    0000:01:00.0
Device Minor:    0

 

[serdar13]

So are you stating that using 3615 on my microserver i can use the P1000?

[flyride]

10 minutes ago, serdar13 said:

So are you stating that using 3615 on my microserver i can use the P1000?

 

He is saying that he has a potentially viable hardware driver compiled for it. Whether your app(s) support it is another question.  Please consider this an invitation to troubleshoot, test and provide value back to the community. You will be the first to make it work if you do.

[IG-88]

i do have all on a test system running, driver loads, all libs seems to be there

the question is how to test and does it work, its kind of a alpha test, no promises and not for linux noobs as i can't help much when something is not working as expected

 

1st test with ffmpeg availible from https://packages.synocommunity.com failed, no nvidia support

Unknown decoder 'h264_cuvid'

so if i dont want to make my own ffmpeg i will have to test with jellyfin docker

[serdar13]

20 hours ago, flyride said:

 

He is saying that he has a potentially viable hardware driver compiled for it. Whether your app(s) support it is another question.  Please consider this an invitation to troubleshoot, test and provide value back to the community. You will be the first to make it work if you do.

I wish i could but when you said it was not possible with my setup i sold the GPU. Wish I kept it now as looks like IG-88 was onto something.

[IG-88]

On 6/15/2020 at 9:57 PM, serdar13 said:

I wish i could but when you said it was not possible with my setup i sold the GPU

i would have said the same two weeks ago, just had the idea for a while to look into the dva system to see what has been used

i did not expect the nvidia driver to just compile against the v24922 3.10.105 source from synology

also i'm not convinced that this is a good way to go for a nas, these nvidia cards are pretty hungry when it comes to power consumption, that gtx 1050 has a higher tdp them a i3-9100 that can already do the job (on 918+) it looks like a alternative for people with xeon's and older hardware but as often repeated transcoding might be overrated, lots of devices can replay 1920x1080 or even 4k without downsizing it first, some of the problems with high bandwidth streams might come from wifi problems (i'd always use 5GHz for this or just a 1GBit nic if possible)

Edited June 16, 2020 by IG-88

[IG-88]

i tried with docker and jellyfin but hardware acceleration with nvidia nvenc had no effect on playback in native resolution and when encoding was active it did not work at all

maybe its because it needs some special docker tools we don't have with dsm's docker

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/installing.html#hardware-transcoding-with-nvidia-ubuntu

a native software might work but i will not pay for plex or emby just to try something i dont even use

maybe i will make a test version and a little howto, i'm not even sure if there is a need for this if its not possible to use without coughing up extra money to use hardware transcoding when most replay devices can cope with 4k streams