Newly installed Nvidia Quatro K2000 in a Dell R910 - hw transcoding

[metalcated 30]

Newly installed Nvidia Quatro K2000 in a Dell R910 - hw transcoding

I just installed a Quatro K2000 2G video card into my Dell R910 into a native16x PCI-e slot. I modified the heatsink and installed a large fan to help keep it cooler and make it fit into the server case. It's staying pretty cool. Now the reason I did this was for several reasons actually. 

1. Running on a VM is not always the best approach. Having hardware support should improve performance. 
2. I want 4K movies to not skip and stutter while watching them (transcoding - usually always audio)
3. I recently bought an HD HomeRun and want better performance (similar to 4K issues).
4. And this has been something I have been wanting to do for a while.
5. I would rather do this than buy a Synology or QNAP or build a dedicated workstation.

All that said... not much improved after installing the card. Maybe a slight improvement, but overall I am still not happy with the implementation. 

• Video still stutters with 4K movies - unwatchable
• Live TV still stutters unless I pause it for 5 seconds, play again and then it's fine - I feel like this should still not happen. 

This used to not happen with my 4K movies even with transcoding enabled running on a VM in vCenter on the same server without a physical video card. I am not certain what happened 3-4 years back but before that point, 4K movies played perfectly. Too hard to try and understand what changed. All I want to do is understand how to fix this moving forward. 

I have several devices I can test this with:

• Web browsers
• Nvidia Shield Pro
• LG OLED TV
• LG LCD TV
• Android Phones
• iPhones 
• iPad
• PC / MacBook

All of them give me the same results. I can provide any details needed to narrow down where the issue is and if in the end this simply is not a good setup (running on a VM with passthrough) then I will buckle down and buy a Synology of QNAP or hell even build a dedicated media box out of some older hardware using the video cards I have here at home. (spare 1030 and 1080). 

Current specs:

• OS: Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
• CPU: 16
• Memory: 32 GB
• Storage: SAS SSD
• Storage for Transcoding: SAS SSD Dedicated
• Audio/Video: Nvidia Quatro K2000 (2GB)

hardware_detection-63769669756.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-b53abc80-c465-4ef9-b1f9-3c82cd0a5a67_1.txt

Edited October 13, 2021 by metalcated

[Happy2Play 9140]

Can you provide the ffmpeg log for a specific example.

[metalcated 30]

3 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

Can you provide the ffmpeg log for a specific example.

Added to OP. Thanks.

[Luke 38803]

Try setting hardware transcoding to the default yes rather than advanced and see if that helps. Thanks.

[metalcated 30]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

Try setting hardware transcoding to the default yes rather than advanced and see if that helps. Thanks.

I did that initially and then changed to Advanced. I changed it back to Yes and no difference.

Edited October 13, 2021 by metalcated

[metalcated 30]

Also here are some insights into the overall system performance while a Live stream is running. 

Edited October 13, 2021 by metalcated

[metalcated 30]

Here is the system when running a 4k file transcoding. 

[Luke 38803]

29 minutes ago, metalcated said:

I did that initially and then changed to Advanced. I changed it back to Yes and no difference.

Please attach a log example from that. Thanks.

[metalcated 30]

22 minutes ago, Luke said:

Please attach a log example from that. Thanks.

Attached

ffmpeg-transcode-e78a1515-f2b6-4175-93ab-4bc82fddda97_1.txt

[metalcated 30]

Quiet over here.  - Anything more that I can do or try? Thanks!!

[Luke 38803]

@softworkz will look at this. Thanks.

[softworkz 4278]

@metalcated - Which Nvidia driver did you install and from where did you get it?

[softworkz 4278]

Try these two:

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/180475/en-us

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/175539/en-us

PS: ffmpeg process taking 44GB is very wrong..

[metalcated 30]

9 hours ago, softworkz said:

@metalcated - Which Nvidia driver did you install and from where did you get it?

Running the distro supported version of the official drivers:

ii  nvidia-driver-470-server               470.57.02-0ubuntu0.20.04.4            amd64        NVIDIA Server Driver metapackage

It's a royal pain in the ass rebooting this VM with passthrough on the current version of ESXi I am running (there is some bug with powering on VM's with passthrough where I need to literally reboot my hypervisor each time I reboot the emby VM and VMware has not provided a fix yet). I will take a look at this as soon as I can today. Thank you. 

Edited October 25, 2021 by metalcated

[softworkz 4278]

I thought you would be running it without virtualization?

As a starting point, you should

• run it on the host machine, not in a guest VM
• install the drivers from Nvidia, the distro drivers are usually incomplete

This is what works and what is supported from our side.

Thanks,
sw

[metalcated 30]

9 hours ago, softworkz said:

I thought you would be running it without virtualization?

As a starting point, you should

• run it on the host machine, not in a guest VM
• install the drivers from Nvidia, the distro drivers are usually incomplete

This is what works and what is supported from our side.

Thanks,
sw

I’m using passthrough which is basically the same as being a physical since the card is dedicated to the VM physically. No support using this type of configuration? I can’t imagine I’m the only one doing this who’s posted for support. I’m going to do the drivers today and will still post back results. Thanks 

[softworkz 4278]

1 hour ago, metalcated said:

I’m using passthrough which is basically the same as being a physical since the card is dedicated to the VM physically. No support using this type of configuration? I can’t imagine I’m the only one doing this who’s posted for support. I’m going to do the drivers today and will still post back results. Thanks 

What I mean is that we don't have such setup here, we can't reproduce those situations and I can't tell you how to set up your system for this.

I didn't mean to say that it doesn't work.

[metalcated 30]

1 hour ago, softworkz said:

What I mean is that we don't have such setup here, we can't reproduce those situations and I can't tell you how to set up your system for this.

I didn't mean to say that it doesn't work.

Ah okay I follow now. I’d be more then happy to setup access privately for someone to troubleshoot if it came down to it. Provided that would help. 

[softworkz 4278]

Let's do the drivers and rule out the virtualization. Those are the typical causes.

After that it's very likely to work and this will be a good starting point for you to get it working with VMWare. 
As mentioned, I can't help you from there - not because of not wanting but because of not knowing.
But possibly there are other community members who will be able to help you out...

[metalcated 30]

On 10/26/2021 at 11:21 AM, softworkz said:

Let's do the drivers and rule out the virtualization. Those are the typical causes.

After that it's very likely to work and this will be a good starting point for you to get it working with VMWare. 
As mentioned, I can't help you from there - not because of not wanting but because of not knowing.
But possibly there are other community members who will be able to help you out...

Sounds good. I STILL have not installed the drivers, got pulled into something else last night. I hope to have time tonight or the next couple of days.

[Luke 38803]

Let us know how you get on. Thanks.

[Luke 38803]

@metalcated are you still having an issue with this?

[metalcated 30]

Thanks for following up @Luke I have yet to install the drivers above, been slammed with work and no time to spend powering down the ESXi host if needed. (I ended up having to do that last time I rebooted the Emby VM with passthrough due to the memory bug in ESXi which has yet to be patched.)

I can try sometime this week if I can find a window of opportunity. 

Edited November 21, 2021 by metalcated

[Luke 38803]

Let us know how you get on.. Thanks.

[Luke 38803]

@metalcated how did this go?