Enable Hardware Transcoding for Immich LXC?

[jordanhandy]

Hi all,
I searched the discussions for an answer to this.. could not find one. Mostly just script requests for Immich.

I'm wondering how we can enable hardware transcoding for the LXC created via the install script? I've already got this working on Docker, and want to migrate to an LXC. Immich's documentation uses Docker as their method of enablement in the tutorial.

Looking through the *.service files for Immich, it looks like this app executes from source, and not Docker containers, so I'm not sure that editing the compose.yml file (found in /opt/immich/source/docker) will make a difference -- I could be mistaken here -- does anyone know how to enable these settings?

Edit: I should add, I opted not to enable OpenVINO for hardware ML. This is specific to videa transcoding. I presently would use vaapi as I use AMD

Thanks

[tremor021]

These are the questions for @vhsdream . Is there a simple way of enabling HW transcoding for this LXC?

[vhsdream]

Hi @jordanhandy

At the moment the script only technically supports hardware-acceleration for Intel iGPUs via QuickSync, as I don't have an AMD GPU to test with. But even when not selecting OpenVINO, the /dev/dri/ devices are still passed through for you.

Have you tried enabling VAAPI in the settings and testing it out? There is a non-zero chance that it might work. Apparently the jellyfin-ffmpeg that is installed already has the necessary Mesa drivers, at least according to the Jellyfin docs.

In your LXC console, run /usr/lib/jellyfin-ffmpeg/vainfo --display drm --device /dev/dri/renderD128 and look for vainfo: Driver version to see if VAAPI is supported. Doing so for me seems to indicate that I could also use VAAPI for my Intel iGPU, so perhaps no additional installation is required.

[tremor021]

check /var/log/immich directory. it should have some logs

[jordanhandy]

Looks like it isn't working.

h264 @ 0x62e8ce57ad40] Reinit context to 1920x1088, pix_fmt: yuv420p
Selecting decoder 'h264' because of requested hwaccel method vaapi
[out#0/mp4 @ 0x62e8ce59c780] Adding streams from explicit maps...
[vost#0:0/h264_vaapi @ 0x62e8ce59ee80] Created video stream from input stream 0:0
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x62e8cee1b200] Failed to open /dev/dri/renderD128 as DRM device node.
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x62e8cee1b200] No VA display found for device /dev/dri/renderD128.
Device creation failed: -22.
[vist#0:0/h264 @ 0x62e8ce59c4c0] [dec:h264 @ 0x62e8ce581900] No device available for decoder: device type vaapi needed for codec h264.
[vist#0:0/h264 @ 0x62e8ce59c4c0] [dec:h264 @ 0x62e8ce581900] Hardware device setup failed for decoder: Invalid argument
Error opening output file /opt/immich/upload/encoded-video/e838c675-4c6e-4d26-bf56-1e82de46ce9e/7d/be/7dbea69a-f941-4344-a239-05258d862553.mp4.
Error opening output files: Invalid argument
[AVIOContext @ 0x62e8ce582700] Statistics: 2671148 bytes read, 0 seeks
^[[39m
^[[31m[Nest] 111943  - ^[[39m06/04/2025, 7:36:48 AM ^[[31m  ERROR^[[39m ^[[33m[Microservices:MediaService]^[[39m ^[[31mError occurred during tra>
^[[31m[Nest] 111943  - ^[[39m06/04/2025, 7:36:48 AM ^[[31m  ERROR^[[39m ^[[33m[Microservices:MediaService]^[[39m ^[[31mRetrying with VAAPI-accel>
^[[31m[Nest] 111943  - ^[[39m06/04/2025, 7:36:48 AM ^[[31m  ERROR^[[39m ^[[33m[Microservices:MediaRepository]^[[39m ^[[31mffmpeg version 7.1.1-J>
  built with gcc 12 (Debian 12.2.0-14+deb12u1)
  configuration: --prefix=/usr/lib/jellyfin-ffmpeg --target-os=linux --extra-version=Jellyfin --disable-doc --disable-ffplay --disable-static -->
  libavutil      59. 39.100 / 59. 39.100
  libavcodec     61. 19.101 / 61. 19.101
  libavformat    61.  7.100 / 61.  7.100
  libavdevice    61.  3.100 / 61.  3.100
  libavfilter    10.  4.100 / 10.  4.100
libswscale      8.  3.100 /  8.  3.100
  libswresample   5.  3.100 /  5.  3.100
  libpostproc    58.  3.100 / 58.  3.100
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x6172ba9e3b40] Failed to open /dev/dri/renderD128 as DRM device node.
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x6172ba9e3b40] No VA display found for device /dev/dri/renderD128.
Device creation failed: -22.
Failed to set value 'vaapi=accel:/dev/dri/renderD128' for option 'init_hw_device': Invalid argument
Error parsing global options: Invalid argument

Not a major issue for me, as I'll rely on my Docker install for now, just something I wanted to dabble in. Interested to see if there could be an eventual solution to this.

Thanks

[vhsdream]

@jordanhandy In the LXC, what is the output of ls -l /dev/dri?

This is all assuming that you've configured everything on your node and in the BIOS properly, of course. The script is unable to handle any of that.

[jordanhandy]

@vhsdream

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root         80 May 22 06:20 by-path
crw-rw---- 1 root video  226,   1 May 22 06:20 card1
crw-rw---- 1 root render 226, 128 May 16 05:48 renderD128

Seems like a permissions issue, based on this output, compared to the service user. Didn't look here originally. Thanks

[vhsdream]

@jordanhandy I should have also asked you to confirm the immich user is in both groups - groups immich

And come to think of it, you might need to install the Mesa driver(s) on your host as well; I don't know the specifics of those, however.

[Patrick010]

You could try SVR-IO on Proxmox. You can then share your GPU in both VM's and LXC's simultaneously. I have no experience with it, my GPU is too old.