Docker settings for intel hardware transcoding

[vdrover]

I have an Intel NUC and would like to use Intel QSV hardware transcoding. I see in the settings that I need to specify the path as, for example, /dev/dri/renderD128.

Here are the contents of /dev/dri folder (Ubuntu 24):

drwxr-xr-x   3 root root        100 May 30 10:27 ./
drwxr-xr-x  20 root root       5.0K May 30 10:27 ../
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root         80 May 30 10:27 by-path/
crw-rw----+  1 root video  226,   0 May 30 10:27 card0
crw-rw----+  1 root render 226, 128 May 30 10:27 renderD128

This all looks good. I have 3 questions:

1. Do i need to add a device in my m3u-editor container first? Eg: --device=/dev/dri:/dev/dri.
2. Do i need to worry about permissions on renderD128?
3. Will the logs show when HW transcoding is in progress so I can follow the process?

[sparkison]

1. Yes! You will need to map your devices
2. I do not believe so, but if you hop on Discord we have a couple users testing the HW transcoding now. I've not had much chance, or experience, with this directly, so it's still in early testing phases. I know VAAPI is working, but not sure on QSV yet...
3. If you have APP_DEBUG=true, there will be a lot of ffmpeg debugging output, so you will be able to see it there. The ffmpeg logs are under storage/logs/ffmpeg-2025-06-02.log (the date will depend on the date you're testing/debugging). Log rotation is enabled, so there will typically be three or less log files retained at any given time. You can add even more debugging by enabling ffmpeg debugging in Settings, this will enable verbose logging for ffmpeg itself, in addition to our standard info logging.

[vdrover]

Adding the device to my YML file, and force-updating the container made the /dev/dri devices available to M3U Editor. For anyone else kinda new at this, you can test for the device inside your container with this command (linux):

docker exec -it m3u-editor ls -l /dev/dri

The output might look something like this:

crw-rw---- 1 root  44 226,   0 Jun  3 09:33 card0
crw-rw---- 1 root 992 226, 128 Jun  3 09:33 renderD128

If you get a "not found" error, then the /dev/dri devices are not available to your container, and hardware transcoding will not work.

[sparkison]

Thanks for the update and info! I'll be sure to get the docs updated once this rolls out to the latest branch.