Distro recommendation

[bruor 43]

I'd like to set up emby on linux with QSV transcoding.  When I was using Jellyfin I attempted this and failed because there's all sorts of issues with Intel having bugs in their driver frameworks etc.  Looking for a distro recommendation that can make it easy to get all the prerequisites for this in place and give me the best change of success out of the box. 

The hardware I'm working with is an i5-8500B that has an onboard UHD 630 gpu.

It seems like Ubuntu is the recommended distribution since the download page for emby on linux defaults to it, but if someone can recommend a specific version for QSV support I'd appreciate it. 
It seems like 20.04 might be the best choice here?  

[Q-Droid 989]

The newest LTS release is likely the best choice. 

[bruor 43]

22.04 is the latest LTS and gave me a ton of problems for hardware accel with jellyfin.  Thu guc/huc stuff wouldn't work and Intel's parkages had bugs that needed resolving last time I checked (summer 2022). I had to manually update to a newer kernel etc as well. 

Looks like there was a .2 release in Feb, will give it another shot. 

Edited April 27, 2023 by bruor

[Q-Droid 989]

Emby is not like Jellyfin in that it doesn't rely on the OS Intel graphics driver libs or base ffmpeg. It installs with its own support for Intel graphics. Give 22.04.x a shot - Coffee Lake is pretty old and well supported. 

[bruor 43]

Thanks for that little gem of knowledge! 

[bruor 43]

I installed the latest LTS and added the enable_guc=2 option for the i915 driver,  updated my initramfs and rebooted,  tested a few videos and it looks like transcoding is working!

However,  I don't see any options in the transcoding settings. I can see in the logs that both VAAPI and QuickSync are detected and shown as hardware encoders and decoders, but all subsequent log lines suggest that it is using VAAPI instead of QuickSync.  Is there a way to choose which one is used? 

Edited April 30, 2023 by bruor

[kikinjo 281]

Latest LTS with kernel upgrade and you will be fine.

[Q-Droid 989]

The Manage Server -> Transcoding pulldown has values Yes/No/Advanced. Set it to Advanced and you'll see the encoders/decoders settings and priority.

 

[Q-Droid 989]

And the Diagnostics Plugin add more transcoding goods.

[bruor 43]

Awesome thanks, ill do some testing at this end! 

What exactly is a temp segment in the diagnostic options? I'd like to reduce thrashing on my NVME if possible. I've noticed that basically anything streamed to a client has files that appear in the transcoding folder, but they are much larger than the amount of RAM I have.  Are these those files or something else altogether? 

[Q-Droid 989]

If any conversion is needed for playback the transcoding temp path is used to save the converted segments that are streamed to the client. Also if Live TV is streamed the transcoding temp path is used for both the conversion and the playback pause/skip segments.

"Thrashing" is a bit of a strong term for a device designed and intended for high rate read/write ops but if you're worried about the NVME stick then you can add a cheap SSD dedicated for transcoding temp.