Hardware acceleration on freebsd host

[slimyshow]

So I was recently digging around to find out if that was the case myself.

Cavet: This answer will be incomplete, I was unable to verify. I don't currently have hardware transcoding support. I had motherboard problems awhile had to swap out my Supermicro X9/Intel E3-1225 v2 hardware for one I could get my hands on quickly, a Supermicro X10/Intel E3-1220 v3. This series does not have Quick Sync. If memory serves, I think this can be quickly checked by running dmesg | grep QSV for the processor Features= flags line. Otherwise, check Intel Ark for your specific processor.

System:
  - FreeBSD 13.2 (amd64)
  - multimedia/jellyfin 10.8.10_1
  - multimedia/ffmpeg 6.1_1,1

I found the FreeBSD package drops the custom jellyfin-ffmpeg client the wiki refers to in favor of the one in ports.

From what I can tell, that version is compiled with a few hardware transcoding options:


$ ffmpeg -encoders | grep h264
...
V....D libx264              libx264 H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10 (codec h264)
V....D libx264rgb          libx264 H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10 RGB (codec h264)
V....D h264_nvenc          NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder (codec h264)
V..... h264_v4l2m2m        V4L2 mem2mem H.264 encoder wrapper (codec h264)
V....D h264_vaapi          H.264/AVC (VAAPI) (codec h264)



$ ffmpeg -encoders | grep hevc
V....D libx265              libx265 H.265 / HEVC (codec hevc)
V....D hevc_nvenc          NVIDIA NVENC hevc encoder (codec hevc)
V..... hevc_v4l2m2m        V4L2 mem2mem HEVC encoder wrapper (codec hevc)
V....D hevc_vaapi          H.265/HEVC (VAAPI) (codec hevc)


However, Intel Quick Sync is not listed. It appears to be disabled in the build flags as VPL=off in the ports info. Probably worth mentioning MFX=off is also off, but it looks like Intel Media SDK is a dead project so that seems fair. Someone more enterprising than me will need to try rebuilding with VPL=on and adding the necessary dependency on multimedia/onevpl.

When I'm able to upgrade my MOBO, I'll probably come back and update this. But it won't be anytime soon.

I hope this helps!

References:
  - https://stackoverflow.com/a/50703794
  - https://stackoverflow.com/a/73238755
  - https://github.com/kern2011/Freenas-Quicksync
  - https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/ffmpeg/