Setting up Intel QSV on Arch Linux and Jellyfin

In my last post, I upgraded my home server/NAS to be an Intel machine. This post I want to write down the process of getting hardware video encoding working - before I forgot.

One of the applications I run on my system is Jellyfin. The open source media server. It's also IMO better then Plex, the (now) closed, requires subscription, and buggy media server. According to Jellyfin document, it supports hardware acceleration (video encoding and decoding) on many platforms. Including Intel.

However getting QSV (QuickSync Video, the newer and better API in Intel) working is a bit more complicted (there's installation instructions for Arch but it does not work for me). I have figured out the overall process. Turns out QSV needs some dependencies to fully work in ffmpeg.

sudo pacman -S intel-media-driver intel-compute-runtime opencl-icd-loader libvpl vpl-gpu-rt

Then add Jellyfin into the render group.

sudo usermod -aG render jellyfin
sudo systemctl restart jellyfin

Now go to Dashboard > Playback > Transcoding and select "Intel QuickSync (QSV)" as hardware acceleration. QSV Device should automatically show up. If not. Something is wrong and go debug it.