Set up NVIDIA NVENC accelerated encoding on Fedora for Wowza Streaming Engine

The Wowza Streaming Engine™ media server software Transcoder supports NVIDIA's NVENC accelerated encoding technology. This article describes how to set up the NVIDIA driver and Wowza Streaming Engine on Fedora to leverage this technology. The procedure in this article was tested against Fedora 18.

Notes:
  • Accelerated encoding isn't available when running on a virtual hardware environment such as VMware or Xen.
  • Older graphics drivers for your NVIDIA hardware may limit NVENC-based video encoding to approximately 30 simultaneous encoding sessions. Update your graphics driver to the latest version to avoid this limitation.

Download and install Fedora


Download and install Fedora 18 on a server that includes a supported NVIDIA graphics card.

  1. Go to Get Fedora: Formats and click the Download Now! button for the 64-bit DVD.
     
  2. Burn the downloaded ISO image onto a DVD.
     
  3. Install the operating system from the DVD.
    • Select the Minimal Install environment
    • Select AddOns Development Tools and Standard

Prepare the system for the NVIDIA driver installation


After the installation is complete and the server is rebooted, do the following to prepare the system for the NVIDIA driver installation.

  1. Log on to the system as root user.
     
  2. Update and upgrade all components.
    yum -y update
    yum -y upgrade
  3. Install Development Tools (should already be installed)
    yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"
  4. Install kernel headers.
    yum -y install kernel-headers
  5. Disable the Nouveau driver:
     
    mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
    dracut --omit-drivers nouveau /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

Download and install the 64-bit Linux driver for your graphics card


  1. Log on to the system as root user.
     
  2. Download the graphics driver for your hardware from NVIDIA Driver Downloads.
     
  3. Make the driver installation package executable.
    chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-*
  4. Run the driver installation package.
    ./NVIDIA-Linux-*
  5. During the installation, accept or acknowledge the following prompts:
    • Skip runlevel check
       
    • License Agreement
       
    • The modeprobe path is incorrect
       
    • Install NVIDIA 32-bit compatibility OpenGL libraries
       
    • Failed to execute chcon -t textrel_shlib_t (missing operand)
       
    • Continue anyway
       
    • Run nvidia-xconfig utility
       
    • Configuration successfully updated
  6. Restart the server.
    shutdown -r 0
  7. Install Java and Wowza Streaming Engine.

You can now use the NVENC encoding implementation in your Transcoder template. For more information, see Set up and run Transcoder in Wowza Streaming Engine.

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