Today’s project involved troubleshooting some video processing errors on my local setup. I’ll walk you through exactly how I tackled it, step by messy step.
Firing Up the Command Line
Started by checking GPU usage with nvidia-smi – showed zero memory allocation despite the encoder running. Weird. Pulled up task manager and saw ffmpeg eating 98% CPU. Okay, time to dig deeper.
Rebuilding Dependencies
Figured maybe a library mismatch. Ran sudo apt purge libavcodec followed by:
- apt install make g++ yasm nasm
- git clone ffmpeg source (massive pain)
- ./configure –enable-cuda-sdk –enable-nvenc
Compilation took like 45 minutes. Microwave burrito break happened here.
Debugging Nightmare
New build kept throwing “NVENC unavailable” errors even after CUDA reinstall. Checked driver versions – mismatch between toolkit and runtime. Had to:
- Uninstall CUDA 11.7
- Wipe nvidia- packages with dpkg
- Install CUDA 12.2 from scratch
Rebooted three times. Neighbor probably heard me yelling at the screen.
Validation Tests
Finally got the pipeline working with:
- ffmpeg -hwaccel cuda -i *4 -c:v h264_nvenc *4
GPU utilization finally showed 78%! Ran benchmarks comparing CPU vs GPU encodes – we’re talking 9x speedup. Worth the suffering.
Post-Crisis Analysis
Moral of the story? Always triple-check dependency trees before compiling from source. And keep backups. And maybe upgrade Ubuntu before the LTS goes obsolete. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need aspirin.