Anyone gotten Quicksync encoding working on a recent Ubuntu?

[Coleman]

I’ve been trying to get hardware encoding recently, without too much luck. The KB instructions that require a kernel recompile are out of date- they refer to a thing that doesn’t even exist (and is unavailable now), the Intel Media Server Studio, as part of the build process. If you got it to work, did you have to do the kernel rebuild in https://www.nomachine.com/AR09O00938?

I’m asking because it looks to me like the Ubuntu 20.04 kernel I’m using (5.8.0-44-generic) already has it? vainfo reports it is using iHD as the driver, which I believe is the one needed for hw encoding with NoMachine. Additionally, I have verified QuickSync hw encoding is available, through ffmpeg. My ffmpeg is built with libmfx support, and because of what vainfo was reporting on the driver, so I think the libraries and drivers in use would be the same ones added via the kernel build in the KB article.

Related question, has NoMachine made any progress on using VA-API for hw encoding, or is it strictly still through the Intel Media SDK/libmfx (I think this is actually what is in use when people say NoMachine is using QuickSync but not vaapi?)

Thank you!

[clatter-kilometer-womanly]

For the most recent Ubuntu distributions and Debian 11 these commands were necessary to enable hardware acceleration via Intel’s QuickSync on the NoMachine node server:

sudo apt install <i>intel-media-va-driver-non-free libmfx1</i>

sudo mkdir -p /opt/intel/mediasdk/plugins

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri /opt/intel/mediasdk/lib64

sudo ln -s /usr/share/mfx/plugins.cfg /opt/intel/mediasdk/plugins/plugins.cfg

 

[Coleman]

Thanks! I should have closed this thread, support helped me get it going in my other thread. In my case, the link to the hardcoded location for the media sdk .so was the thing I needed to get it all working. Your instructions cover the whole library path, support just had me do the one file. I didn’t need anything with the plugin config.

It’s good to have all the bits summarized in one place though!

 

[clatter-kilometer-womanly]

Yes. As a reference, for this server version 7.3.2 these are paths that it is looking for. The symbolic links will make it happy.

strings /usr/NX/lib/*.so | grep mediasdk

mediasdk/lib64
/opt/intel/mediasdk/plugins/plugins.cfg
/opt/intel/mediasdk/lib64

 

[Carin]

For the specific case reported by Coleman, the path is /opt/intel/mediasdk/lib64 and it is set inside the LIBVA_DRIVERS_PATH environment variable that vaapi is searching through.

As for these two other strings mentioned (mediasdk/lib64 and /opt/intel/mediasdk/plugins//plugins.cfg) they are from libmfx.so and usually this should not be needed for this specific problem as it is about redirecting vaapi library that it should use iHD driver and should look for it inside /opt/intel/mediasdk/lib64.

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