GPU Driver Installation
Ant Media Server can use hardware-based encoder that is available in some NVIDIA GPUs. If you have a NVIDIA GPU, you can check that your GPU contains hardware-based encoder on Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix
Answer is Performance. Performance increases 5x over x264(CPU) encoder. Btw, x264 is one of the best h.264 software encoder and Ant Media Server uses x264 if there is no GPU in the system.
After you are sure that your GPU contains hardware-based encoder, the only thing is installing CUDA toolkit to your system.
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1604/x86_64/cuda-repo-ubuntu1604_10.2.89-1_amd64.deb
Install repository meta-data
dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1604_10.2.89-1_amd64.deb
Import CUDA Public GPG Key
sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1604/x86_64/7fa2af80.pub
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/cuda-repo-ubuntu1804_10.2.89-1_amd64.deb
Install repository meta-data
dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1804_10.2.89-1_amd64.deb
Import CUDA Public GPG Key
sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/7fa2af80.pub
Update repository cache
sudo apt-get update
Install CUDA Runtime 10.0
sudo apt-get install cuda-runtime-10-0
If you've installed latest version of CUDA runtime(such 10.1) and it does not work, you can install following packets for compatibility
sudo apt-get install cuda-cudart-10-0
sudo apt-get install cuda-compat-10-0
If everthing is ok, you can run the command below to see the status of your GPU
nvidia-smi
You can install Ant Media Server with its usual way or if you already install it, you can restart the Ant Media Server.
sudo service antmedia restart
Ant Media Server will check and log at startup if there is a hardware-based GPU encoder in the system and it will use it automatically. No need to do anything.
If you need more information for installing on other systems, please check NVIDIA docs and CUDA downloads pages
If you have any questions or comments, just send an email to contact at antmedia dot io or fill the contact form.