Quicksync/nvenc

This is supported in TrueNAS SCALE.

We cannot make it work on 12.

Plex supports NVidia on Linux, not on FreeBSD. If you want a jail with NVidia hardware transcode, your first stop is to convince Plex to support that.

You could also follow the work to allow PCIe passthrough via bhyve in TrueNAS Core 12.x. if that lands, you could run a Linux VM and do your NVidia hardware transcode via Plex there.

I went over the github but I didn’t see any mention of external gpu for example nvidia quadro p2000, would that be possible with similar approach ? Further more if we use an external gpu I think this will not effect the IMPI as we won’t take over any of the motherboard or cpu graphical hardware.

my hope is to have freenas with p2000 and run Plex in a jail that’s capable of nvenc and nvdec

In case someone stumbles across this, there are instructions that have been followed successfully on 11.3 and 12.0: https://github.com/kern2011/Freenas-Quicksync

I am wondering whether this should make it into TrueNAS as a supported feature. Turning on hw acceleration kills the KVM on the IPMI, and that's a big deal. A user making that choice very deliberately by following instructions is one thing; enabling hardware acceleration while breaking KVM-on-IPMI with the click of a checkbox another. It could be supported in TrueNAS Core with sufficient warning. I wouldn't call that urgent, though. Given that it breaks KVM-on-IPMI, and I see no way around that, maybe having it gated behind some additional work is the right way to go.

I do know that FreeNAS is designed that way on purpose. I was just wondering how can get around it.

Thanks for your advice. I will consider that in future.