This means that you’re going to need the build dependencies for the software, and for that you will have to configure Linux to allow downloading from source code repositories in your software sources.

The next step will involve recompiling your current version of ffmpeg. You need to copy these files so that “ffmpeg” (an encoder frequently found with linux distros) will recognize NVENC and incorporate it. You don’t need all the files in the ZIP, so we’re now going to navigate to “Samples/common/inc.” Copy everything you see there to your “/usr/local/include” folder. You will need to make an account, but the process is pretty straightforward. To get NVIDIA’s NVENC working on Ubuntu, you first need to download the NVIDIA Video Codec software development kit (SDK) from this site. I explain here how you can do this in distributions that are based on Ubuntu. Since Linux doesn’t have NVENC by default, you’re going to have to get it working by hand. Using NVENC, not only can you convert videos more quickly than with a conventional CPU, but you can also stream video through software like Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) while reducing or completely eliminating stutter and lag. This allows you to use the GPU to encode video streams. To solve this issue, NVIDIA cards have a nifty little trick that they’ve been using since the release of the GeForce 600 series graphics cards back in 2012 called NVENC.

Download NVEnc 7.25