Truenas scale, Plex, RTX 3050, drivers, keylase driver patch

[Saberwolf]

A P2000 is the same price as a 3050 lol and the 3050 has a lot more VRAM and better encoder. The Turing (7th gen) NVENC encoder is much better than the pascal encoder for efficiency and picture quality. I’m using a GTX1660 now. And it’s also better than the P2000. The same Turing encoder and more VRAM. And when I bought it it was about half the cost of a P2000. VRAM basically limits how many transcodes you can do. More so than the encoder itself. Especially for 4k transcodes.

And I’d like to have the better hardware for future proofing when Plex adds more codecs to their transcoder. Transcoding is not just for backing up files. Plex transcodes on the fly for anything that needs it (clients that don’t have a 4k tv, or someone watching from their phone). The move from a 1660 to a 3050 is really just for the extra 2GB VRAM. even though Ampere does have a better decoder as well, it’s not the main reason for the upgrade. Honestly I’d go for a 3060 for 12GB if they weren’t so expensive right now.

But this thread isn’t about hardware choice. It’s about getting the right features into TrueNAS given a set of hardware. Even if I stuck to a Quadro level card, there will be new cards. The RTX A2000 for example also needs newer drivers than what TrueNAS Scale has.

mute point as current supported drives are up to 535.54.03 just get the NVIDIA RTX A2000 price save your self the hassel

 

[BMac1337]

So there's a lot of points here that I would like some clarification on.

Some background. I've been running a Truenas Core system since it was called Freenas the original system was installed with Freenas 11, and upgraded along the way to truenas 12 (latest). I initially had Plex running on the Truenas system via the plugin, but wanted to utilize nvidia GPU transcoding and it seemed that GPU support in VMs or jails would never come (is it still a dead feature for core? will never be implemented?). So I spun off Plex into it's own system on totally separate hardware. Currently my plex server is running on a system with Ubuntu 20.04 server on bare metal. also with a GTX 1660, nvidia drivers installed, along with the keylase driver patch to unlock transcode streams.

So now that Scale has proper GPU support in containers and VMs being Linux-based, Id like try to move everything back to one box. I have truenas scale 22.02.0 (release) installed, and I have successfully migrated my operational VMs over as a test (using clonezilla to image then re-image), and I will soon start migrating my other media automation apps (transmission/*'arrs/etc). But I'm unsure how to proceed with Plex or if it's possible to do what I want.

First, drivers for the GPU. the new Scale system will have an RTX 3050 for transcoding. Nvidia lists that this GPU requires the 510 drivers. but from what I've read in other posts, it seems that Scale has 460 drivers included? is that still correct? is there any way to update them? Similarly, is it possible to have different nvidia drivers used inside the Plex container than the host has?

Next, the keylase patch. this patch is easy to apply on bare metal, you just install the drivers and run the patch. their github also lists directions for a docker install. but as I understand it, the Plex app is Kubernetes, not Docker. so has anyone got the keylase patch to work with the default Plex app?

I "think" these issues could be resolved by running Plex in a VM, but I would really prefer to have plex in a container and ideally in the default plex app provided by Truenas.

Can I ask whether the 3050 would be the best option today, two years later? How has your experience been with it?