GPU passthrough Intel NUC


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Hey all, was thinking of picking up an Intel NUC as a small unraid box (mostly for a few small VM's) and one of them would be Plex. I've read there are sometimes issues with passing through the only gpu (the intel iGPU in this case) to a VM. My plan would be to passthrough the Intel GPU to a windows VM for plex transcoding. Any issues doing this? (or any others you see?)

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18 hours ago, Warrentheo said:

The top pinned thread is all about this:

I suspect however that a NUC will be severely under-powered for that task...  Even after iGPU passthrough...

Thanks for the link, as for it being underpowered, you do know there are I7  NUC's and NAS devices with Celerons can do HA transcoding these days?

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On 3/16/2019 at 9:24 PM, ken-ji said:

Why not run Plex ( or Emby or Jellyfin ) as a docker container with iGPU enabled and pass-thru the device for HA transcoding.

I'm running Emby on my Kaby-lake Pentium G4620 on HA transcoding... (though the current Emby has some performance issues)

I am not sure what benefit that would be? The question is still there if i can reliably passthrough the iGPU (which i have read mixed results about). Also unless it has changed recently anything linux based cannot encode and decode with HA, only a windows setup can. Also with the windows VM i can run Ombi and Tautulli in there too

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Sorry if I wasn't clear.

Unless you absolutely need to run a Windows VM, in which case go ahead and do so, HA transcoding in linux works very well with the iGPU (up to the 8th gen intel processors - due to the 9th gen needing the latest Linux kernel). In fact it works so well, I'm only using a Pentium G4620 to watch 4K HEVC files transcoded to 15Mbps H264 with Emby. The G4620 has a Passmark of 5200 per core.

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7 hours ago, Blindsay said:

unless it has changed recently anything linux based cannot encode and decode with HA

I don't know how recently, but it has changed. There is a patch for plex which takes care of this. I don't use plex but I have seen the discussions about it. Plex will eventually support this natively. Emby and jellyfin already does this natively. So a vm just for this is such a waste of resources. 

 

Edit: There's a lot of discussion on the plex patch here: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/77813-plugin-linuxserverio-unraid-nvidia/

AND there's also docker containers for ombi and tautulli.

 

About the plex patch, it might only work on nvidia now that I think about it, but I'm not sure since I've not read all the info that's out there.

 

Edited by strike
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2 hours ago, ken-ji said:

Sorry if I wasn't clear.

Unless you absolutely need to run a Windows VM, in which case go ahead and do so, HA transcoding in linux works very well with the iGPU (up to the 8th gen intel processors - due to the 9th gen needing the latest Linux kernel). In fact it works so well, I'm only using a Pentium G4620 to watch 4K HEVC files transcoded to 15Mbps H264 with Emby. The G4620 has a Passmark of 5200 per core.

ah gotcha, no worries thanks for explaining. My NAS has the Intel Celeron J3455 so I am going to try that first but if it doesnt have quite enough grunt i need something that can run the following,

 

-Plex transcoding (no 4k Content, all 1080p but ideally up to 10 concurrent streams)

-Ombi

-Tautulli

-Torrent/VPN combo (I need the traffic of these to be segregated from everything else, so either its own container or VM or whatever)

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2 hours ago, strike said:

I don't know how recently, but it has changed. There is a patch for plex which takes care of this. I don't use plex but I have seen the discussions about it. Plex will eventually support this natively. Emby and jellyfin already does this natively. So a vm just for this is such a waste of resources. 

 

Edit: There's a lot of discussion on the plex patch here: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/77813-plugin-linuxserverio-unraid-nvidia/

AND there's also docker containers for ombi and tautulli.

 

About the plex patch, it might only work on nvidia now that I think about it, but I'm not sure since I've not read all the info that's out there.

 

Yeah in that link though "Note: Emby will both decode and encode using the Nvidia GPU, Plex currently only encodes."

 

Afaik with Plex the only way to get encode and decode with a gpu is within Windows (I have a Quadro P2000 within a windows VM currently FYI, It was in unbuntu and i switched to windows because of this)

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15 minutes ago, Blindsay said:

Yeah in that link though "Note: Emby will both decode and encode using the Nvidia GPU, Plex currently only encodes."

Yeah, but if you continue to read you will see there's a workaround to get decode to work also. There are literally pages with discussion on this, but I think you need an nvidia gpu. And since you have a P2000 why not use that? And pass it through to a plex container 

Edited by strike
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On 3/18/2019 at 9:00 PM, strike said:

Yeah, but if you continue to read you will see there's a workaround to get decode to work also. There are literally pages with discussion on this, but I think you need an nvidia gpu. And since you have a P2000 why not use that? And pass it through to a plex container 

I dont want to use the P2000 because the server is getting retired and i want to move to something much smaller

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