Recently I helped a Patron to setup an instance of my Emby docker-swarm recipe, but with the extra bonus of having all transcoding done using his GPU. Note that this would work equally well for Plex, or any other “Dockerized” application which would, technically, support GPU processing.
I have two Windows 10 desktops in my home. One has a NVIDIA GTX1060 and the other has an AMD R470.
Does AMD have a similar setup so both hosts can transcode properly?
Also, with this setup, would you recommend I run docker on a VM running linux? Or just run Docker for windows?
Thanks.
Sorry, missed this. Best bet here is running the GTX under nvidia-docker on Linux. I don’t think it’s at all possible in Windows 
Hey @funkypenguin,
I’m trying out this guide and I think I’ve got everything set correctly. I have the runtime as nvidia and the env variable set for plex. I can see the Nvidia card in the plex container but I’m getting the error 11230:Sep 16, 2018 20:15:00.432 [0x7f1b733ff700] DEBUG - Codecs: hardware transcoding: opening hw device failed - probably not supported by this system, error: Invalid argument when the server is running.
Any ideas?
Thanks for the quick reply @funkypenguin
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
overlay 49272632 30685544 16061136 66% /
tmpfs 65536 0 65536 0% /dev
tmpfs 32931428 0 32931428 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
storage 42890405376 19690219520 23200185856 46% /movies
/dev/sdi1 49272632 30685544 16061136 66% /transcode
shm 65536 8 65528 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 32931428 12 32931416 1% /proc/driver/nvidia
udev 32902140 0 32902140 0% /dev/nvidia0
tmpfs 32931428 0 32931428 0% /proc/acpi
tmpfs 32931428 0 32931428 0% /proc/scsi
tmpfs 32931428 0 32931428 0% /sys/firmware
root@TheHoard:/dev# env
HOSTNAME=TheHoard
PUID=1000
TERM=xterm
LC_ALL=C.UTF-8
PGID=1000
NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
PWD=/dev
LANG=C.UTF-8
SHLVL=1
HOME=/config
affinity:container==351dadd5522594140ce25ef75aa43c46cd10c375ea2f91f29211ebe251da9b87
CHANGE_CONFIG_DIR_OWNERSHIP=true
_=/usr/bin/env
OLDPWD=/
Inside the container I also see:
root@TheHoard:/dev# ls
core fd full mqueue null nvidia0 nvidiactl ptmx pts random shm stderr stdin stdout tty urandom zero
root@TheHoard:/dev# nvidia-smi
Sun Sep 16 21:32:45 2018
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 390.87 Driver Version: 390.87 |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0 Quadro P2000 Off | 00000000:02:00.0 Off | N/A |
| 0% 27C P0 16W / 75W | 0MiB / 5057MiB | 3% Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: GPU Memory |
| GPU PID Type Process name Usage |
|=============================================================================|
| No running processes found |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
root@TheHoard:/dev#
It seems like the card is showing up in the container there but I’m not sure.
Just for reference as well my docker compose file looks like this:
plex:
image: plexinc/pms-docker:plexpass
container_name: plex
runtime: nvidia
environment:
- PGID=1000
- PUID=1000
- NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all
volumes:
- /storage/container_configs/plex:/config
- /storage/media/tv_shows:/tvshows
- /storage/media/movies_4k:/tvshows_4k
- /storage/media/movies:/movies
network_mode: "host"
restart: always
Aha.
Try adding this additional env variable:
NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=compute,utility
Hmm
Still seeing this when it attempts to transcode:
Sep 16, 2018 21:53:16.412 [0x7f8d9dfff700] DEBUG - Codecs: hardware transcoding: testing API vaapi
Sep 16, 2018 21:53:16.412 [0x7f8d9dfff700] DEBUG - Codecs: hardware transcoding: opening hw device failed - probably not supported by this system, error: Invalid argument
Sep 16, 2018 21:53:16.414 [0x7f8d9dfff700] DEBUG - Codecs: hardware transcoding: testing API vaapi
Sep 16, 2018 21:53:16.414 [0x7f8d9dfff700] DEBUG - Codecs: hardware transcoding: opening hw device failed - probably not supported by this system, error: Invalid argument
Updated compose file:
plex:
image: plexinc/pms-docker:plexpass
container_name: plex
runtime: nvidia
environment:
- PGID=1000
- PUID=1000
- NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all
- NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=compute,utility
volumes:
- /storage/container_configs/plex:/config
- /storage/media/tv_shows:/tvshows
- /storage/media/movies_4k:/tvshows_4k
- /storage/media/movies:/movies
network_mode: "host"
restart: always
Here’s the output from a working Emby container with an nVidia GPU exposed:
/ # df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
overlay 3914269104 2476888104 1238524504 67% /
tmpfs 65536 0 65536 0% /dev
tmpfs 32964632 0 32964632 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476888104 1238524504 67% /config
prod1:/storage 242960993280 216413934592 21663166464 91% /media
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476947852 1238464756 67% /etc/resolv.conf
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476947884 1238464724 67% /etc/hostname
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476947924 1238464684 67% /etc/hosts
shm 65536 0 65536 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 32964632 12 32964620 0% /proc/driver/nvidia
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948060 1238464548 67% /usr/bin/nvidia-smi
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948108 1238464500 67% /usr/bin/nvidia-debugdump
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948148 1238464460 67% /usr/bin/nvidia-persistenced
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948188 1238464420 67% /usr/bin/nvidia-cuda-mps-control
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948236 1238464372 67% /usr/bin/nvidia-cuda-mps-server
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948268 1238464340 67% /usr/lib64/libnvidia-ml.so.396.54
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948316 1238464292 67% /usr/lib64/libnvidia-cfg.so.396.54
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948352 1238464256 67% /usr/lib64/libcuda.so.396.54
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948396 1238464212 67% /usr/lib64/libnvidia-opencl.so.396.54
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948444 1238464164 67% /usr/lib64/libnvidia-ptxjitcompiler.so.396.54
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948492 1238464116 67% /usr/lib64/libnvidia-fatbinaryloader.so.396.54
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948540 1238464068 67% /usr/lib64/libnvidia-compiler.so.396.54
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948584 1238464024 67% /usr/lib64/libvdpau_nvidia.so.396.54
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948620 1238463988 67% /usr/lib64/libnvidia-encode.so.396.54
/dev/md1 3914269104 2476948668 1238463940 67% /usr/lib64/libnvcuvid.so.396.54
And environment:
/ # env | grep NVIDIA
NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=compute,utility,video
NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all
/ #
I don’t think so. nvidia-docker adds an additional runtime to your docker environment, and it’s unLIKELY this’ll work with UnRAID 
I only see (hw) appear on the encoding side and not decoding for Plex on ubuntu 16.04. Is this a known issue or did I do something wrong?
EDIT: Seems to be a limitation of the plex transcoder that should eventually get updated. Hardware Accelerated Decode (Nvidia) for Linux - Feature Suggestions - Plex Forum
Thank you for this mini tutorial, it really helped me out getting my own Emby container running with nvenc!
You’re welcome FYI, there’s a bug in the current stable version which occasionally disables your transcoding settings. It’s fixed in the recent betas, and will be addressed in stable 3.6.0.