There's some information on the status of headless NVCODEC support on this issue:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-plugins-bad/issues/902
The merge request that Seungha Yang is referring to that fixes issues with headless operation is not in version 1.16.2 of gst-plugins-bad but is available on master. From my experimentation, I've been able to confirm that it works. If you're not comfortable depending on master, the only alternative I'm aware of is to use the closed-source NVCODEC plugins available as part of the DeepStream SDK from Nvidia.
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