Trying to get HW transcoding to work with Nvidia Quadro K620.

[hooraah 5]

I've been getting by on software transcoding for awhile now but Im finally trying to fix whatever Im doing wrong with HW transcoding.

Short version - I've tried HW transcoding several times with this and a few other GPUs on this install and have never been able to get it to work.  I have a lifetime emby premiere subscription.  I attached some FFmpeg transcode logs and Im not sure what to make of them.  It looks like it recognizes the quadro as a decoder and then just doesnt use it.

Side note - the quadro should be an encoder as well, according to the matrix, but it doesn't show as one.  Thats what I'd really like to work because I want to take the load off of 4K transcodes, but right now I cant even get decode to work, so one step at a time I guess.

I have a 1050ti Im going to eventually move to, but Im trying to get this moving before I start adding more variables.

 

ffmpeg-transcode-5a3d0690-ccd4-4a77-8298-5c23f395d629_1.txt

[RanmaCanada 496]

Kepler cards require ANCIENT drivers and have probably had all support for them removed from current builds of FFMPEG.  It also won't do anything for your 4k trancodes as Maxwell can only hardware decode H264.  4K files are in HEVC/X265.

Replace your card as it's useless for what you want to use it for. 

[Happy2Play 9781]

You would get more decoding capability out of the 1050ti.

But with the current K620 it might be drives as Emby is using/only sees DX11VA.

 

23:17:29.469 [h264 @ 0000026c2b8c4cc0] No device available for decoder: device type d3d11va needed for codec h264.

23:17:29.471 Device setup failed for decoder on input stream #0:0 : Unknown error occurred

Info    Previous transcoding attempt failed. Falling back to software transcoding.

 

[hooraah 5]

Well, that was dumb.  When I put this together for emby, the hardware was old enough that I assumed driver updates had stopped long ago and that I had the latest one pulled from windows update (especially since I had the nvidia tray icon and thought it must have gotten the whole package from Nvidia).  Well, that was wrong.  I just went and updated with the latest nvidia driver package and it enabled NVENC and NVDEC both in emby and in handbrake.  Im still kind of curious why the DXVA don't work as I remember doing older HW decodes with DXVA in the past, but whatever.  It works now.  I go through all the hard stuff trying to find a solution and it turns out to be something easy like a driver update....

11 hours ago, RanmaCanada said:

Kepler cards require ANCIENT drivers and have probably had all support for them removed from current builds of FFMPEG.  It also won't do anything for your 4k trancodes as Maxwell can only hardware decode H264.  4K files are in HEVC/X265.

Replace your card as it's useless for what you want to use it for. 

I get what you're saying here, but in this case the card is helping me just enough to be very useful.  Some of my latest 4K content will transcode in software, some of it is just barely over what the CPU can do and stutters.  With other users transcoding 1080 streams on top, it cant keep up.  Decoding my 4K in software and then encoding in HW on the card (and allowing outside network users to dec/enc 1080 in hw) gives me just enough of a margin to get by in the short term and keep people from telling me 'the server isn't working, its stuttering'

The 1050ti is going in for sure, but I need to install my sons new GPU in his system before I can take the 1050ti out, and I'm getting fiber internet installed today so the GPU swaps may not happen for a week or so while I prioritize other things.  In the meantime, this is a nice short term fix.

Thanks for the help everyone!

[Luke 42079]

Thanks for following up !