AlmaLinux NVidia Drivers missing decoder package?

[bigjustin]

Does anyone know if the “libnvidia-decode” and “libnvidia-encode” packages are missing from the AlmaLinux NVidia drivers? I do a grep and nothing a shows up.

nvidia-smi gives me:
NVIDIA-SMI 580.65.06
Driver Version: 580.65.06
CUDA Version: 13.0

The reason I ask is because I noticed that Plex isn’t using hardware acceleration even though it’s enabled in the Transcoder settings. It sees the GPU, it’s just not utilizing it, so the CPU is doing all of the work.

I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled twice now using the commands on the native nvidia support page.

AMD Epyc 4124p
RTX 3050 GPU
6.12.0-55.27.1.el10_0.x86_64

Please let me know if there’s more info you need.

Thanks!

[Fekthis]

Hi @bigjustin!
Instead of trying to find the packages mentioned, why not try checking the libraries for the video card, where you might find what you’re looking for?

Try this:

find /usr/lib* -name '*nvidia*decode*' 
find /usr/lib* -name '*nvidia*encode*'

If you haven’t found anything, the problem comes from Alma, which now uses Nivida’s Open GPU driver.

All the best!

[jlehtone]

The only NVidia thing that AlmaLinux builds is the kernel module. The rest of driver comes from NVidia’s “CUDA” repository.

This output is from Alma 9 system (and I removed i686 versions from the list):

# dnf -q --enablerepo=cuda\*,elrepo,rpmf*updates provides */libnvidia-encode.so.5\*
nvidia-driver-cuda-libs-3:580.65.06-1.el9.x86_64 : Libraries for nvidia-driver-cuda
Repo        : @System
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/lib64/libnvidia-encode.so.580.65.06

nvidia-driver-cuda-libs-3:580.65.06-1.el9.x86_64 : Libraries for nvidia-driver-cuda
Repo        : cuda-rhel9-x86_64
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/lib64/libnvidia-encode.so.580.65.06

nvidia-x11-drv-libs-580.76.05-1.el9_6.elrepo.x86_64 : Libraries for the NVIDIA OpenGL X11 display driver files
Repo        : elrepo
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/lib64/libnvidia-encode.so.580.76.05

xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda-libs-3:570.172.08-2.el9.x86_64 : CUDA libraries for xorg-x11-drv-nvidia
Repo        : rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/lib64/libnvidia-encode.so.570.172.08

The main thing is that each of the three usual repos (NVidia’s CUDA, ELRepo, and RPM Fusion) have the libnvidia-encode within their el9 packages.

---

You should get similar list of package(s) with “dnf provides”, if the el10 version of any package has such file. Then it would be a package to install, although at least the above ones tend to come in as dependency.

If the “dnf provides” finds no package that would provide the library for el10, then the issue is with the packager of the driver packages (who is no Alma).

[bigjustin]

@Fekthis

find /usr/lib* -name '*nvidia*decode*'

Sorry, I’m getting my terminologies mixed up. But yes, the libraries are missing. I was hoping that I could just manually put them there somehow, but I assume it’s not that simple.

[Fekthis]

I would recommend backing up the system first, then trying to install them manually.

[jlehtone]

Basically, there are three scenarios (for a problem):

• No package provides the file. Nobody has made a package that would have said file. One would have them (in this case NVidia) to make such package
• There is a package that provides the file. One simply installs the file
• Package exists, is installed, and file is in the system but not found by application for some reason

---

The libnvidia-encode library file can be found from packages made by NVidia for both rhel9 and rhel10. dnf install nvidia-driver-cuda should install also that package (assuming repo cuda-rhel10-x86_64is used as source for NVidia drivers).

No package seems to provide the libnvidia-decode for neither rhel10 nor rhel9. Google finds older hits about Ubuntu packages, so at some point NVidia has had a package with that library for some distros, but does not have one now for RHEL (and hence for Alma). You have to ask NVidia about that.

[bigjustin]

Well damn!!! Thank you for confirming that for me.

At least I know I’m not losing my mind. :-/