Question / Help Do we still need to compile FFMPEG for NVENC support?

[SolarLune]

Hey, there.

I've been distro-hopping, trying to find one that's stable and works well for me, and I've currently settled on Linux Mint. I added the OBS PPA and downloaded the latest version (20.0.1). I recall automatically having NVENC support on another distro, so I'm wondering if maybe automatic NVENC support was added to OBS / OBS's bundled FFMPEG at some stage and I'm just missing something?

Or is NVENC-enabled FFMPEG still something that would have to be configured in when building FFMPEG (and so, for whatever reason, the other distro had an FFMPEG build with NVENC support configured)?

 

[Osiris]

OBS on Linux does not come bundled with ffmpeg.

 

[Keyz]

On Arch it works out of the box.

 

[SolarLune]

OK, I must have tried a rolling release distro or something that had FFMPEG with NVENC support built-in. NVENC + FFMPEG would be really convenient to have bundled with OBS in the future. Anyway, thanks.

 

[Luis Alvarado]

OBS on Linux does not come bundled with ffmpeg.

Hi Osiris, do you know a way (A compile guide for example) to add the current FFMPEG version which already includes NVENC to OBS. Basically what I am trying is to use the support the GTX 1080 offers with the power OBS offers for streaming. Took a while to see that OBS was not detecting ffmpeg and hence, it was not taking NVENC into account. When possible, please let me know if you know of any case I could benefit from using OBS but with NVENC. Thank you friend.

 

[Nitrogen]

I would like to mention that as of Ubuntu 17.10 (artful aardvark) ffmpeg built with NVENC support is present in the distribution repository! So is OBS Studio! (It's an OBS v19, so not the bleeding edge, nevertheless it has the option to select NVENC) Therefore for all you Ubuntu users out there looking to try NVENC with OBS it is now as easy as:

apt install ffmpeg obs-studio

As long as you're running artful like myself or willing to update.

To be 100% clear on this one I must state that I was unable to verify the operational state of said software since this particular machine isn't equipped with a capable GPU. YMMV!