Hardware transcoding cannot be activated. (only emby)

1st Official Post

    i've been desperately trying to activate hardware transcoding in emby for several days now. i just can't get it to work.. No hardware is displayed in the settings under 'preferred hardware decoders'.


    My system:

    - Emby runs with docker in a VM in Truenas. (hope it is ok, that i ask this question here:) with my host is everything fine. See 'further information')

    - Truenas Scale Version: Dragonfish-24.04.2.5

    - Emby version: 4.8.10.0

    - Portainer version: 2.21.5

    - VM OS: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

    - Graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 1060


    There are some errors in the hardware_detection log file:

    - hardware_detection.txt: “Message”: “Failed to initialize VA /dev/dri/renderD128. Error -1”

    - What have I tried?

    - Tried tons of instructions in forums and youtube

    - Considered the Emby documentation.

    - switch off immich and then test emby

    - server restart


    Further information:

    - I use immich in the same VM. The hardware acceleration also works there via docker without any problems. So it must be a problem with emby.

    I hope that someone can help me. Unfortunately, emby is for me quite useless without the feature, as the CPU load is far too high.

    Thanks for reading


  • crashtest

    Approved the thread.
    • Official Post

    I don't have anything for you but:

    I have to say, you have a few layers of abstraction there. You're running Emby, in a Docker, that's running in a Ubuntu VM , on a bare metal "TrueNAS" host.

    To be honest, I'm not surprised that you can't pass hardware from the bare metal host, through two layers of "VM like" hardware layer abstraction. (If you find the solution, I'd be interested in what it is.) I am somewhat surprised that it works with immich.

    If you need the hardware transcoding assist you might give thought to running Emby, alongside TrueNAS, on the host machine. (Maybe a quick install and a test?)

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