Intel Graphics for Decoding & Nvidia Encoding

[roberto188 33]

Has anyone been able to successfully enable separate hardware decoding and encoding with the new emby server? The option to use my i2500 for decoding is listed and I select it, the option to use my quadro K2000 for encoding is selected. GPU-Z shows my K2000 encoding, but the Intel GPU is never engaged and I can see based on the load that my CPU is decoding. Anyone have any success using two different pieces of hardware for encoding and decoding? Also, for whatever reason, when I used my K2000 for both hardware encoding and decoding, it doesn't property de-interlace.

[Luke 42086]

The server will allow you to configure this, but it hasn't been heavily tested. Can we please go over an example? Thanks !

[roberto188 33]

Yeah I'm gonna grab some beers tonight and test a whole bunch of things and post logs (this post and my other).

[Luke 42086]

Thanks !

[roberto188 33]

Attached. Failed on Quicksync both decode and encode.

ffmpeg-transcode-51e0ea51-8d5e-49cc-a823-aebd00384b45_1.txt

[Luke 42086]

@@softworkz

[roberto188 33]

I think the issue is that intel requires the pixel format to be NV12 and the TV signal is YV12, so it can't directly decode it without a filter to convert. Why it's not using QSV to encode I don't know.

[softworkz 5076]

The actual problem is that the vpp filter cannot be created which is part of the Intel graphics driver.

I've never seen this before.

 

You should check whether you have the latest version of the Intel graphics drivers installed (directly from the Intel site).

[softworkz 5076]

Has anyone been able to successfully enable separate hardware decoding and encoding with the new emby server? The option to use my i2500 for decoding is listed and I select it, the option to use my quadro K2000 for encoding is selected. GPU-Z shows my K2000 encoding, but the Intel GPU is never engaged and I can see based on the load that my CPU is decoding. Anyone have any success using two different pieces of hardware for encoding and decoding? Also, for whatever reason, when I used my K2000 for both hardware encoding and decoding, it doesn't property de-interlace.

 

Quick answer to your original question: 

 

Ideally decoding and encoding is performed on the same hardware device. Usually, those hw implementations have dedicated resources for decoding and encoding, so you would not gain any advantage if your idea would be about "load distribution". 

 

It's rather the opposite: The ideal transcoding happens in a way that the data remains at the hw device from decoding over filtering to encoding. This would be a "full hardware transcoding pipeline" where no data transfer is required from hw memory to system memory.

This would be the most desired setup, but there are things coming into play that don't allow the latter, e.g. subtitle burn-in or color conversions.

 

Mixed transcoding should generally be viewed as a fallback solution, either user-configured (when there are problems with a certain hw codec) or auto-selected when one hw codec is not capable to handle the required transcoding and another one is chosen instead. (or in case of AMF where DXVA2 needs to be used for decoding as there's just an AMF encoder available).

[roberto188 33]

The actual problem is that the vpp filter cannot be created which is part of the Intel graphics driver.

I've never seen this before.

 

You should check whether you have the latest version of the Intel graphics drivers installed (directly from the Intel site).

I did exactly that right before I tested. Downloaded the lastest version for Intel 2nd gen chips...now that I think about I though, I may have failed to restart the system upon completion of driver install. I'll try it again.