Currently, I use Debian on my server. I have an Intel Arc GPU that I use for transcoding, however hardware encoding doesn’t work. I am able to get a slight performance benefit from decoding, but encoding would be much better. I have an A750 in my desktop (not server), and was able to get hardware acceleration working, but only with openSUSE Tumbleweed with the stable kernel (6.9.4). While I would love to have encoding, (I am limited on upload speed and av1 encoding isn’t practical on the CPU for multiple streams), I doubt it would be stable using a rolling distro and non-standard kernel. Has anyone else tried anything like this? Are there any arc + jellyfin users out there who know any way to make this work, or any openSUSE self-hosters could vouch for its stability? I am willing to try almost any distro (except ubuntu) to make this work.
Edit: fixed. There was some firmware I needed to work on debian. I will link and such in a bit when I have time.
You can use Debian Testing.
One downside of debian testing is you don’t get security patches when the package is freezed under testing.
Rather use sid, but comes with it’s own share of troubles !
Edit: I’m currently on Manjaro, wich is somehow a “semi-rolling” release based on arch. It takes a few weeks before it hits the stable branch. But while I love it as daily drive, don’t know if I would recommend it as server.
Servers need to be stable, that’s why I use debian stable on my server.
Maybe give fedora server a try? Which is more uptodate than debian and maybe more stable as a server OS than a rolling release !
I believe that I’ve tried that. I currently use the backports kernel anyway.
Which kernel do you use on Debian? IIRC support for Intel Arc was added in 6.0 or higher. I am using Proxmox (based on Debian) and I had to upgrade from 5.15 to 6.2 kernel to get hardware decoding to work. Have you checked the Jellyfin manual? It’s pretty elaborate on how to get Intel QSV working.
I ran sid for 6 years without issue. You might like it :)
EDIT: I only switched after my employer mandated an Ubuntu flavor
Use of hardware enablement package kernel might help here? It is called linux-generic-hwe or something like that. It will install a much newer kernel with more support for newer hardware.
I am running an Arc A40 on an Ubuntu VM for Plex. They only problem I have is VM not booting after it is restarted. Restarting the host fixes the issue.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000091844/graphics.html
