I am so far unable to get Plex/ffmpeg to recognize the integrated GPU in my Core i7-8700 CPU. From my research it appears this is a common issue related to Coffee Lake CPUs, not just this specific model.
I started on vanilla Ubuntu 18.04, but also tried installing a mainline 4.17 kernel on 18.04, as well as upgrading to Ubuntu 18.10 with default kernel as well as latest mainline 4.18 kernel. None of these have resolved the issue.
Additional troubleshooting attempted:
usermod -aG video USERNAME
Editing /etc/default/grub with the following options:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash quiet i915.alpha_support=1"
Later changed to:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash quiet intel_pstate=skylake_hwp i915.enable_guc=-1 i915.alpha_support=1"
(using
sudo update-grub
after each change)Confirmed integrated GPU is enabled in BIOS
Installed latest graphics drivers from http://ppa.launchpad.net/oibaf/graphics-drivers/
Followed the entire process to build QuickSync-enabled binaries from here
Nothing seems to be working. From what I've read, my current kernel version includes support for Coffee Lake graphics, but they simply are not recognized. Here are some additional details to aid in troubleshooting:
The error Plex logs when trying to use hardware transcoding:
ERROR - [FFMPEG] - No VA display found for device: /dev/dri/renderD128.
CPU: i7-8700
Motherboard: MSI Z370 Gaming Plus (MS-7B61)
Ubuntu version: 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish (development branch)
Current kernel: 4.18.0-7-generic
vainfo
error: failed to initialize display
sudo lshw -C video
*-display UNCLAIMED description: VGA compatible controller product: Intel Corporation vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pciexpress msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:de000000-deffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff ioport:f000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff
lsmod | grep i915
(nothing)
lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 3e92
ls /dev/dri
ls: cannot access '/dev/dri': No such file or directory
I would really appreciate any help getting this working. Let me know if there's any further information you'd like me to collect.
For anyone who stumbles across this thread in a search: after using ukuu to update to mainline kernel 4.18.11-041811-generic, hardware video transcoding with Quick Sync now works. If you update your kernel to 4.18.11-041811-generic and that alone doesn't solve the issue, perhaps the updated video drivers from the oibaf PPA are needed too; I already had those installed prior to updating my kernel.