NVIDIA CUDA is no more....

[sharkbite]

On upgrading to the 340.52 nvidia drivers i discovered that the dll responsible for CUDA encoding is no longer included...

so for the the conversion tools i use (Mediacoder,Freemake,Mediaespresso)
CUDA hardware acceleration is effectively no longer supported.

It is possible - there is a modded driver out there (or in my case to keep it alive i just rolled back to an older driver)
but no longer officially supported by NVIDIA..

I have contacted the developers from each of the abovementioned apps - they were unaware. (Nice job NVIDIA)

I suppose it's an attempt at getting people to move to the NVENC hardware encoder including on all
Kepler (and newer) video cards.
Since Kepler is around 2 years old and there are as yet NO freely available applications that use it - i'm not surprised.

Contrary to some online pundits - mediaespresso does not now, nor has it ever supported NVENC.
This was conveyed to me by their online support.
Having CUDA pulled out from under them seemed to come as a surprise.

so.....it seems farewell is in order for nvidia GPU encoding.....it was fun while it lasted

never mind - helps my business case to stock up on a Haswell....(only this time if i need high end graphics i'm going ATI out of sheer spite)

[netmask56]

Thanks for heads up - I was just about to update.

[Selur]

Thanks for the heads up, seems like nvcuenc.dll was removed, does anyone know if it's license wise okay to bundle 'nvcuenc.dll' with an application?

[Selur]

Seems to be only the encoder part, DGDecNV still works,..

[Selur]

To clarify: Only the support for the deprecated nvcuenc interface/libary has been removed.
Encoding through the newer nvenc interface should still work.

-> Only problem is that most old tools only use the nvcuenc interface, so until some software gets rewritten, a bunch of old encoders will not work anymore.

[Dougster]

I rolled back my NVIDIA display driver back to 314.07 and everything works again. Thanks to the OP for the heads up, caught
me totally off guard.

[KenEzthex]

But hey! I upgrade to v340.52 but I'm still having DLL for cuda and still get supports from all converter tools I search CUDA in my system and found here

C:\WINDOWS\system32\nvcuda.dll (Description : NVIDIA CUDA Driver, Version 340.52)

And all cuda runtime in my video converter tools folder

You install driver with clean install? if not, just try it!

KenEzthex

[Selur]

@KenEzthex: Not all tools are bothered by this change, only those that:
a. rely on the nvcuenc.dll in the system folder.
b. use nvcuenc for encoding

[sharkbite]

But hey! I upgrade to v340.52 but I'm still having DLL for cuda and still get supports from all converter tools I search CUDA in my system and found here

KenEzthex

Thanks KenEzthex...

which convertor tools to you use?

cheers,

[HemLok]

On upgrading to the 340.52 nvidia drivers i discovered that the dll responsible for CUDA encoding is no longer included...

so for the the conversion tools i use (Mediacoder,Freemake,Mediaespresso)
CUDA hardware acceleration is effectively no longer supported.

It is possible - there is a modded driver out there (or in my case to keep it alive i just rolled back to an older driver)
but no longer officially supported by NVIDIA..

I have contacted the developers from each of the abovementioned apps - they were unaware. (Nice job NVIDIA)

[...]

Grab the previous WHQL'd NVIDIA drivers (337.88) and extract the installer to a folder using 7-zip. Then search the extraction folder for "nvcuvenc". You'll find "nvcuvenc32.dl_" and "nvcuvenc64.dl_". Use 7-zip to decompress the file from whichever is appropriate. I extracted "nvcuvenc64.dl_" and then renamed the resulting file to "nvcuvenc.dll" and placed that file in the install directory of MediaCoder x64. CUDA encoding was re-enabled on my system.

[Selur]

yup, putting the nvcuenc dll next to the binary of the encoder should help.

[KenEzthex]

I use TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress and works perfectly......

And I copy the important DLL files from the old version as backup

nvcuda.dl_
nvcuvenc.dl_
nvcuvid.dl_

When I need to use these files, use cmd to extract them as

x:\expand xxxxx.dl_ x:\xxxxx.dll

which x means your local drive and xxxxx means the name above

[sharkbite]

thank you!

in the meantime -

https://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVDFab-Decrypter

looks like this actually has NVENC support....if monitoring with GPU-Z is telling the truth...
i also have the stock 340.52 nvidia drivers installed - so i know that CUDA is gone....


Encodes DVB captured mpeg to h264 - the "high quality"setting does it in about 19-20x real time....
the "video engine load"is about 60% - the "GPU load" is 10%
GPU temp stayed at 30C the whole time....
....and importantly the quality looks to my eyes to be very good

looks like the tactic dropping CUDA support worked for at least one vendor!

[sampalmer]

Grab the previous WHQL'd NVIDIA drivers (337.88) and extract the installer to a folder using 7-zip. Then search the extraction folder for "nvcuvenc". You'll find "nvcuvenc32.dl_" and "nvcuvenc64.dl_". Use 7-zip to decompress the file from whichever is appropriate. I extracted "nvcuvenc64.dl_" and then renamed the resulting file to "nvcuvenc.dll" and placed that file in the install directory of MediaCoder x64. CUDA encoding was re-enabled on my system.

For anyone using Freemake video converter, I couldn't get these instructions to work. I tried extracting

Display.Driver/nvcuvenc32.dl_

to

C:\Windows\System32

, but CUDA support was still not detected. I also tried registering the DLL using

regsvr32

, but it said the DLL wasn't compatible. I also tried putting it in

C:\Program Files (x86)\Freemake\Freemake Video Converter

, but that also didn't work. In the end, I uninstalled the nVidia drivers and did a clean install of the 337.88 ones, and this resolved the problem. I was able to find this version of the driver here: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx.

[max0r4axor]

I had to use both dll's for Freemake Video Converter to work. Just copy nvcuvenc32.dll as nvcuvenc.dll to the c:/windows/system32 and the nvcuvenc64.dll as nvcuvenc.dll to c:/windows/SysWOW64 folder. I'm using Windows 7 64 Ultimate

[ndjamena]

I had to use both dll's for Freemake Video Converter to work. Just copy nvcuvenc32.dll as nvcuvenc.dll to the c:/windows/system32 and the nvcuvenc64.dll as nvcuvenc.dll to c:/windows/SysWOW64 folder. I'm using Windows 7 64 Ultimate

.... and that worked? I'm pretty sure you're supposed to put 32 bit dlls in the Syswow64 folder and 64 bit dlls in system32... aren't you? (WOW = Windows On Windows and is an emulation of sorts of the 32 bit environment for 64 bit systems... at least that's what I was told).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64

[CubDukat]

Grab the previous WHQL'd NVIDIA drivers (337.88) and extract the installer to a folder using 7-zip. Then search the extraction folder for "nvcuvenc". You'll find "nvcuvenc32.dl_" and "nvcuvenc64.dl_". Use 7-zip to decompress the file from whichever is appropriate. I extracted "nvcuvenc64.dl_" and then renamed the resulting file to "nvcuvenc.dll" and placed that file in the install directory of MediaCoder x64. CUDA encoding was re-enabled on my system.

Will this approach work with the 900 Series cards as well? I'm putting together a new system, and I will be replacing my current GTX 460 2GB with two GTX 970s.

Also, if it does work, does CUDA encoding use the cores on all of the cards in a system, or just one? I'm planning on setting the 970s up for SLI.

Hopefully it'll work, but if not, I guess I could always fall back on Quick Sync. At lest that would still work...

[sharkbite]

I dont think CUDA encoding works in SLI...

And even if it does... you wont be using all those cores...
the problem is that CUDA is only used for encoding...
So you end up being CPU bound anyway...
I couldn't get my lowly GTS250 to even break a sweat,
and it only encoded at about 6x real speed converting Aussie DVB Mpegs to Apple MP4's.

Imagine my annoyance at getting a GTX650 that didn't end up encoding any faster despite many more CUDA cores....

HOWEVER!

in the mean time, DVDFAB now uses NVENC, a hardware encoder present on all kepler and above...
this is quick - really quick -
depending on the source file, i am getting between 15-20x real speed. Quality is pretty good too.
I believe the hardware encoder on maxwell (GTX970) is even faster.

Also - mediacoder is working on an NVENC solution.

[b1972630]

Solution Brief: Error in Media Coder - "This application has failed to start because NVCUVENC.DLL was not found"

Reason: NVCUVENC.DLL not follow the new drivers.

Do this:

1) Go to the Nvidia site (http://www.geforce.com/drivers) and download previous versions of the drivers for the model of your video card

2) Unzip the executable using a program like 7zip, Winzip, Zipper, etc ...

3) Go to the folder and look Display.Driver of the following files: nvcuvenc.dl_, nvcuvenc32.dl_ or nvcuvenc64.dl_ and copy this file to your drive c: \. Should you not find any of these files then go back to the Nvidia site and download older drivers

4) Start menu, run type cmd + enter

5) Run the extract command: c: \ expand xxxxx.dl_xxxxx.dll. Example: c:\expand nvcuvenc.dl_ nvcuvenc.dll or c:\expand nvcuvenc32.dl_ nvcuvenc32.dll or c:\expand nvcuvenc64.dl_ nvcuvenc64.dll

6) Copy the file nvcuvenc.dll or nvcuvenc32.dll or nvcuvenc64.dll in the folder to the installation folder of MediaCoder

7) Run MediaCoder and enable CUDA encoder

Good fun! I Love MediaCoder!

[ndjamena]

One day I hope to get a NVidia card for NVDecode. Will this effect fft3dGPU?

[Selur]

Nope FFT3DGPU doesn't use nvcuenc.

[ndjamena]

So it's not actually CUDA that's been discontinued, just the encoding component... And the thread title is misleading?

[Selur]

It's also not the encoder component in general that's discontinued.

It's just the old nvcuenc component, the newer nvcenc one works fine. (but since most developers got de-motivated by the performance of the old encoder, only a few think about going through the trouble to write a new encoder based on the nvenc example from the sdk.
Personally I thought about it, but deemed it to troublesome to rewrite the code to support std::in pipes and proper flags for a command line tool.
If someone would release a proper (and free) command line encoder which supports std::in pipes I would probably support it in Hybrid, but I'm not really motivated to rewrite a command line tool based on the nvenc example like I did for nvcuenc.

=> Yes, the thread title is misleading since CUDA has nothing to do with this. nvcuenc, which is discontinued, doesn't use CUDA, it uses the encoder chip on the graphic card.

Cu Selur

[ndjamena]

Cool, now I can read the thread without my brain blanking out in incomprehension.

[Brainiarc7]

It's also not the encoder component in general that's discontinued.

It's just the old nvcuenc component, the newer nvcenc one works fine. (but since most developers got de-motivated by the performance of the old encoder, only a few think about going through the trouble to write a new encoder based on the nvenc example from the sdk.
Personally I thought about it, but deemed it to troublesome to rewrite the code to support std::in pipes and proper flags for a command line tool.
If someone would release a proper (and free) command line encoder which supports std::in pipes I would probably support it in Hybrid, but I'm not really motivated to rewrite a command line tool based on the nvenc example like I did for nvcuenc.

=> Yes, the thread title is misleading since CUDA has nothing to do with this. nvcuenc, which is discontinued, doesn't use CUDA, it uses the encoder chip on the graphic card.

Cu Selur

Selur, please build this ffmpeg branch on Windows and integrate it in your software, Hybrid.
This branch has NVENC baked in (use libnvenc as the encoder instead of libx264):

https://github.com/agathah/ffmpeg_libnvenc

The repo has all the details in the wiki. Please check it out and give feedback

[Selur]

will look into it

[Selur]

-> reading https://github.com/agathah/ffmpeg_libnvenc/wiki
I'm a bit confused.
It states:

1. Setup build environment (see FFmpeg website)
2. Apply the patch to FFmpeg source

Where is the patch? From the looks of it https://github.com/agathah/ffmpeg_libnvenc only hosts the complete source of ffmpeg where the patch is already applied.

Also the site states:

ffmpeg.c libavformat/matroskaenc.c libavformat/movenc.c * Add support for using "libnvenc" wherever "libx264" is used

which sounds to me like this will break libx264 support.

-> Can anyone provide 32/64bit ffmpeg builds ? (or alternatively a patch which adds libnvenc support, but doesn't kill lib264 support)

Cu Selur

Ps.: @Brainiarc7: Since documentation is rather sparse I'm not sure if this will make it into Hybrid any time soon.

[Brainiarc7]

-> reading https://github.com/agathah/ffmpeg_libnvenc/wiki
I'm a bit confused.
It states:

1. Setup build environment (see FFmpeg website)
2. Apply the patch to FFmpeg source

Where is the patch? From the looks of it https://github.com/agathah/ffmpeg_libnvenc only hosts the complete source of ffmpeg where the patch is already applied.

Also the site states:

ffmpeg.c libavformat/matroskaenc.c libavformat/movenc.c * Add support for using "libnvenc" wherever "libx264" is used

which sounds to me like this will break libx264 support.

-> Can anyone provide 32/64bit ffmpeg builds ? (or alternatively a patch which adds libnvenc support, but doesn't kill lib264 support)

Cu Selur

Ps.: @Brainiarc7: Since documentation is rather sparse I'm not sure if this will make it into Hybrid any time soon.

@Selur ,

This may be a better branch. Well documented and stuff.

https://github.com/BtbN/FFmpeg/tree/nvenc

[Selur]

Same thing, not a patch but another branch where the patch has already been applied.

[themaster1]

On upgrading to the 340.52 nvidia drivers i discovered that the dll responsible for CUDA encoding is no longer included...

so for the the conversion tools i use (Mediacoder,Freemake,Mediaespresso)
CUDA hardware acceleration is effectively no longer supported.

It is possible - there is a modded driver out there (or in my case to keep it alive i just rolled back to an older driver)
but no longer officially supported by NVIDIA..

I have contacted the developers from each of the abovementioned apps - they were unaware. (Nice job NVIDIA)

[...]

Grab the previous WHQL'd NVIDIA drivers (337.88) and extract the installer to a folder using 7-zip. Then search the extraction folder for "nvcuvenc". You'll find "nvcuvenc32.dl_" and "nvcuvenc64.dl_". Use 7-zip to decompress the file from whichever is appropriate. I extracted "nvcuvenc64.dl_" and then renamed the resulting file to "nvcuvenc.dll" and placed that file in the install directory of MediaCoder x64. CUDA encoding was re-enabled on my system.

I've tried to follow your tip (except i'm using the 320.18 drivers version) without luck

Each time i start mediacoder i get " this dll is not designed to run on windows or contain error". I've tried both x86-x64 mediacoder versions.