Plex Media Server, Docker and VPU

VIM4
1

Which system do you use? Android, Ubuntu, OOWOW or others?

Khadas official image of Ubuntu 22.04

Which version of system do you use? Khadas official images, self built images, or others?

See above.

Please describe your issue below:

VIM4 works great as a Plex Media Server (PMS), running in Docker, with no desktop. However, it is somewhat limited without VPU support for hardware transcoding.

Would I be able to expose the VPU to Docker and thus to Plex Media Server if I installed a DE (ie Gnome)?

I only have 17 GB of eMMC storage available and would like to avoid installing a DE if possible since the VIM4 is running as a headless server.

2

How you will use the hardware transcoding ? with ffmpeg?

3

Hi, @numbqq . Plex Media Server supports Hardware-Accelerated Streaming and Background Conversion. Exposing the VPU to PMS will offload some of the workloads on the CPU and help to reduce bandwidth when streaming to bandwidth-limited networks and devices. From what I can see, VIM4 has a fairly robust VPU and should work really well.

4

Hi, @numbqq — Is it correct that installing a DE will present the VPU to Plex and other applications when running Linux?

5

Not sure, I don’t know how plex use the VPU, can you check whether it works when don’t use a docker container?

6

Arm vpu doesn’t really have good transcoding support on linux specially mainline.

I am not sure how well transcoding will work with aml drivers.

I don’t have high hopes from amlogic chips to do high level transcoding for plex or jellyfin.

I have jellyfin running in s905x2 no hardware acc ofcourse.

7

@Spikerguy - Are you running Jellyfin natively or in Docker? Desktop or headless server?

8

Dockers on headless server.

9

So, we have a similar setup.

Unfortunately, running sudo glxinfo or sudo lshw -C video on the host doesn’t present the GPU or VPU and Portainer doesn’t detect the GPU or VPU either.

I was hoping to install the AML drivers at least and see how well they perform since the integrated VPU supports encoding and decoding of h.264, h.265 and AV1. I would hope they would perform better than the CPU stack.

10

I’m still learning Linux, what would be the command string to invoke the VPU in FFMpeg? If possible, I’d like to use the VPU in Tdarr as well.