Emby Hardware Acceleration working on j5005 with tweak

[CS01-HS]

The instructions here enabled hardware decoding on my j5005 board (UHD Graphics 605/Gemini Lake) but encoding produced garbled output.

 

I assumed it had something to do with Unraid or the 4.19 kernel but apparently not - it's solved by forcing Emby to use the container's i965_drv_video.so instead of iHD_drv_video.so.

 

NOTE 1: As of Emby 4.6.* which includes an iHD driver with fixes for Gemini Lake it's no longer necessary to disable iHD, so I've struck through the instructions below.

 

NOTE 2: if you're getting video-related freezes with unRAID 6.9 as I was - adding a dummy HDMI plug to my headless setup and updating Syslinux configuration as below seems to solve it:

label Unraid OS
  menu default
  kernel /bzimage
  append initrd=/bzroot intel_iommu=on,igfx_off

 

Here's how to do that:

 

# Launch an EmbyServer shell:

docker exec -it EmbyServer /bin/sh

# Inside the shell disable iHD_drv_video.so

cd lib/dri/
mv iHD_drv_video.so iHD_drv_video.so.disabled

 

# Restart EmbyServer

 

Now both hardware decode and encode should work.

 

NOTE: You must add intel_iommu=igfx_off to your syslinux.cfg (see this post for details)

NOTE: I'm using the official EmbyServer release in Community Apps

Edited January 15, 2021 by CS01-HS

[CS01-HS]

Since this patch is required whenever the container's reinstalled I wrote a quick script for the User Scripts plugin.

 

#!/bin/bash

# Verify it's running
running=`docker container ls | grep EmbyServer | wc -l`
if [ "${running}" != "0" ]; then
  docker exec EmbyServer /bin/sh -c "mv /lib/dri/iHD_drv_video.so /lib/dri/iHD_drv_video.so.disabled" 2>/dev/null

  if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then 
    echo "EmbyServer: Detected iHD driver. Disabling and restarting EmbyServer..."
    docker restart EmbyServer
    echo "Done."
  fi
fi

exit 0

 

Edited October 12, 2020 by CS01-HS
tweak script

[CS01-HS]

Follow up:

 

As of (at least) 6.9.0-beta30 adding intel_iommu=igfx_off to syslinux.cfg is no longer necessary with my j5005. 

[CS01-HS]

Update:

As of Emby 4.6.* (currently in beta) which includes an iHD driver with fixes for Gemini Lake it's no longer necessary to disable iHD.