[Guide] Hardware Transcoding: The JDM way! QuickSync and NVENC

I mean, you can have a 10Gb direct setup with 2 cards and a cable for less than $75… how cheap are we talking?

Something like this. I was seeing a lot of these cards for under 10 bucks the other day. Set up for Peer to Peer and I suppose it would be a cheap option. I think the kicker would be to find some cards that have full height and low profile options.

I have never used FC, but I am under the impression that it uses fibre channel protocol to transfer information that is largely used for storage networks, like a storage controller to a storage server. They do not use the Ethernet protocol, so no IP addresses. I really don’t think it would work at all.

I went with 40G QSFP cards with SFP+ adapters, because it was the best bang for the buck a year ago, but if I were to do it today I would probably just get two of these nics ($35 each): Mellanox MCX311A-XCAT CX311A ConnectX-3 EN 10G Ethernet 10GbE SFP+ PCI-E NIC | eBay

plus two cheap SR optical LC-LC tranceivers like these ($7 each): Genuine Cisco SFP-10G-SR V03 Transceiver Module 10-2415-03 Grade A. | eBay

And a OM4 optical LC-LC patch cable ($4.90) like this to connect them together: LC-LC OM4 Multimode Fiber Patch Cable Duplex 2m - FS

I am also running a switch that has four SFP+ ports so I connect my 10G machines (UNRAID, PLEX Server, workstation) to it directly through the fiber I have described above.

Hope this helps,

Yeah I wasn’t sure how it worked. That’s outside of anything I’ve ever messed with but would be neat to get into. Looks like there is a FC over IP protocol but yeah maybe not mess with it.

So maybe someone can give their input on this. I encountered a NFS problem…“Stale File Handle” which from googling basically means that the NFS server changed and I gather wasn’t reflected on the client end so it borked it. I ended up doing a sudo umount -f /plexmedia and then sudo mount -a which took care of the problem.

Is there some ways to prevent that from happening? All I did was tidy up the server share by deleting some stuff.

this is one option you can use to avoid this issue:

ok, I’m coming from a windows environment, so please forgive the lack of knowledge

I understand the setup of ubuntu and the plex setup, but the way I have my setup is 2 separate NAS boxes, and this will replace my primary PMS/transcoder box

Why am I setting up Unraid? is it to facilitate the remote connections?

Unraid is the OS that a large majority of the people around here use for their storage servers. If you already have another OS on your NAS, you should be able to keep using it, you’ll just need to figure out how to export the media via NFS. If you’re not sure how to do that, you can make a separate post in #technology:tech-support or ask for help in the Discord tech support channel. Once you have the media shared via NFS, you can use the remainder of the guide above to set up Plex on the dedicated box.

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thank you so much for the quick reply.
the 2 NAS’ will be readybuilt appliances (sacrilege , I know), but per the documentation do support NFS
so I would set them up to share via nfs, and then use the rest of the guide to mount them so PMS on Ubuntu can see them and I’m good to go. yes?

Yep, as long as you can get the files exported from your NAS appliances via NFS, you can follow the rest of the guide pretty much as written.

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Thanks so much for the great writeup, @JDM_WAAAT!

I’m currently implementing this, finally migrating from a single windows box to a SuperMicro 846 unRAID NAS + Ubuntu Quicksync combo. Since it’s been a while since someone asked this question, is it safe to use Ubuntu 19.10 or should I hunt for a 19.04 download?

You can try 19.10, but I haven’t validated its functionality yet. Last I heard, there were some outstanding issues.

I love the idea of a seperate NAS Killer and a QuickSync transcoding box.
I’m testing this with two J1900 builds. One as a NAS Killer and the other as the PlexBox.
I’m thinking about using the NAS for storing my media but syncing it to the PlexBox.
This way I have a backup of my media on my NAS and Plex can use local storage for accessing the media.
What do you think about this?

I followed the guide and did something wrong somewhere.

I have a NAS with unraid and using the hp 290 running ubuntu 19.04.

I did the df -h command to see my mounted drives and the media shares from unraid don’t show up.

Not sure what to do to troubleshoot this.

UNRAID shares:
\unraid\user\4ktv
\unraid\user\4kmovies
\unraid\user\movies
\unraid\user\tv

Ubuntu ftsab file:
192.168.1.25:/mnt/user/4ktv /mnt/4ktv nfs defaults,noatime 0 0
192.168.1.25:/mnt/user/4kmovies /mnt/4kmovies nfs defaults,noatime 0 0
192.168.1.25:/mnt/user/tv /mnt/tv nfs defaults,noatime 0 0
192.168.1.25:/mnt/user/movies /mnt/movies nfs defaults,noatime 0 0

Do you have your unraid NFS permissions set correctly?

I think so, they are set to Private. Same user name/pw for ubuntu user and unraid user.

Edit: I updated the password for my unraid/ubuntu user to ensure it was the same, rebooted and ran df -h and the drives are now mounted.

Thanks for the help, awesome guide!

hmmm just wondering,
is it really needed for a dummy plug when using igpu transcodes?
I followed ur guide, but using ubuntu18.04 and nfs from my NAS. When transcode, both top and bottom shows hw which means its transcoding, but I didn’t plug in anything.

From what I understand dummy plug needed if you don’t have the machine plugged into a monitor.

this is what i read here too,
but mine didn’t plug anything and hw transcoding works.
but on ubuntu 18.04,
this is why i asked.

here is a screenshot1584893574(1)