Solution to installing Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu 22.04 for transcoding

[Dogsbody 4]

TL;DR

Ubuntu actually make it really easy to install the right nvidia drivers however there are separate packages for NVDEC & NVENC so you need to find the right packages.

The magic sauce (at the time of writing) is...

sudo apt install nvidia-headless-525-server nvidia-settings nvidia-utils-525-server libnvidia-decode-525-server libnvidia-encode-525-server

Background

I'm running Emby in a VM (on TrueNAS SCALE). I decided to add a GPU and PCI passthrough for hardware accelerated transcoding.

All the advice on the Emby pages say that you should install the nvidia driver from the nvidia homepage and NOT from the package manager. I couldn't get this to work and it felt wrong as I wouldn't get automatic security patches.

There seemed to be other users on the forums that had installed an entire xserver dekstop on their VM's just to get the drivers to work.

I was adamant that I wanted to use the package manager.

Nvidia drivers can typically be installed with a simple...

sudo apt install nvidia-headless-525-server

...however that obviously didn;t work.  You have to specifically install the nvidia libraries for NVDEC & NVENC...

sudo apt install libnvidia-decode-525-server libnvidia-encode-525-server

... the rest is just gravy which give you tools like `nvidia-smi`...

sudo apt install nvidia-settings nvidia-utils-525-server

I hope this is of use to someone else.

[Luke 40065]

Hi, thanks for sharing.

[SweatySoap 1]

I'm hoping this necropost will be forgiven, because it's important for me to express genuinely thank you to OP. Your post is the kind of example that inspires me to help pass on little bits of info where I can, even if it's not some big grand guide or full-blown tutorial, because this absolutely helps people out. I was growing frustrated searching for a solution, coming across posts of people asking the same thing but commenters throwing out off-topic suggestions. Thank you OP for doing the work to come up with a clean solution, and thank you for sharing it.

For reference, this still worked just fine for Ubuntu 22.04 for an Nvidia P2000 using `-550` instead of `-525`.

TL;DR thanks:)