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

Builds [LGA1151,LGA1200] NAS Killer 6.0, Plex QSV Builds
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Software Installation & Configuration

General

5/7/20 - updated recommendation to 20.04 desktop.
I recommend Ubuntu 20.04 desktop and will base this guide off of that. Earlier versions do not have all of the codecs needed, later versions can break some things.
You can install Plex via whatever method you want. It’s not important for this guide.

General outline of steps:

  1. Configure Unraid for NFS shares
  2. Install Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop
  3. Prepare Network Share Locations
  4. Make the network drives mount on startup
  5. Install Plex
  6. Enable Hardware Transcoding

If you know how to do all of this, great!
If you don’t, I’ve outlined the simplest method to complete these tasks below.

1. Configure Unraid

Enable NFS under settings, nfs
Go to users, add user and add a user that will have the same credentials as your ubuntu account
Go to shares and select the share you want to export to linux
Under nfs security settings change export to yes, change security to private

2. Install Ubuntu

For this guide, I’m going to use 20.04 desktop - I found this to be easiest overall for people who are not experienced with Linux. Other users have reported success with 20.04 server, however some have ended up switching back to 20.04 desktop. YMMV.

  • Download the .ISO here and make a bootable install disk using Rufus on a windows machine, using an empty flash drive 8GB or larger.
  • Boot to the USB drive on your new server
  • Install with all default options
  • Add a user account and password (same as what we configured in Unraid earlier)
  • In Settings > Global Share Settings, set Tunable (support Hard Links) to NO
    • You need to stop the Array to make this change
  • Restart your Unraid server

3. Prepare Network Share Locations

Open a terminal window.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nfs-common

Make a directory for each unraid media share that Plex will be using.

sudo mkdir /mnt/tv
sudo mkdir /mnt/movies

1/14/21 update:

I highly recommend using this guide instead by @Mthrboard for AutoFS on Linux. This will ensure that your shares stay mounted, and auto-remount if they were to get disconnected for any reason. This guide replaces step 4.
[Guide] Auto-Mounting Filesystems in Linux

4. Make the network drives mount on startup

Edit your fstab to connect your network drives on startup.

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add line for each network NFS share.

[YOUR_NAS_IP]:/mnt/user/[SHARE_NAME] /mnt/[CLIENT_SHARE] nfs defaults,noatime 0 0

Example:

192.168.1.2:/mnt/user/tv /mnt/tv nfs defaults,noatime 0 0 
192.168.1.2:/mnt/user/movies /mnt/movies nfs defaults,noatime 0 0

Press ctrl+x to exit, y to save, and press enter.
Reboot, verify the share(s) auto mounts in /mnt/

5. Install Plex

Download and install Plex for Linux here.
Choose Ubuntu (16.04+) / Debian (8+) - Intel/AMD 64-bit.
Sign in to claim your server, create libraries for your media.

6. Enable Hardware Transcoding

Enable hardware transcoding in the transcoder settings!

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