Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

VP9 Encode Support Added To VA-API

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • VP9 Encode Support Added To VA-API

    Phoronix: VP9 Encode Support Added To VA-API

    Intel has added VP9 encoding support to the Video Acceleration API (VA-API)...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I am running Ubuntu 16.04 on a Intel "Haswell" 4770K and using Firefox 46.

    On some YouTube videos the computer gets very slow and I can hear the CPU fan start spinning up.

    I don't know if it is a VP9 or H.264 video or what kind of video it is. I don't know if it is GStreamer or FFmpeg or VA-API or X-Video or whatever it is that handles decoding.

    Why is this?

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by uid313 View Post
      I am running Ubuntu 16.04 on a Intel "Haswell" 4770K and using Firefox 46.

      On some YouTube videos the computer gets very slow and I can hear the CPU fan start spinning up.

      I don't know if it is a VP9 or H.264 video or what kind of video it is. I don't know if it is GStreamer or FFmpeg or VA-API or X-Video or whatever it is that handles decoding.

      Why is this?


      You can easily see what codec is in use by right-clicking and selecting "Statistics for nerds". Whan decoder your computer uses? No idea.

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by uid313 View Post
        I am running Ubuntu 16.04 on a Intel "Haswell" 4770K and using Firefox 46.

        On some YouTube videos the computer gets very slow and I can hear the CPU fan start spinning up.

        I don't know if it is a VP9 or H.264 video or what kind of video it is. I don't know if it is GStreamer or FFmpeg or VA-API or X-Video or whatever it is that handles decoding.

        Why is this?
        Because video presentation pipelines in browsers suck completely. Most people don't realize that video playback is a combination of two things, there isn't just decoding, there's also presentation. And Firefox on Linux does presentation in software, that's why it's slow, no matter what the codec is. Decoding is done in software too BTW (no VAAPI or VDPAU support in Firefox yet), so there's double slowness. The only way that I know of to improve the situation is using pepperflash with freshplayer-plugin, as this plugin has VDPAU and VAAPI support as well as opengl presentation. But that of course only covers Flash, not HTML5 video.

        For Chromium there's a patch that adds VAAPI support, however I'm quite sure that's just for decoding, I have no idea how Chromium does presentation.

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by uid313 View Post
          I am running Ubuntu 16.04 on a Intel "Haswell" 4770K and using Firefox 46.

          On some YouTube videos the computer gets very slow and I can hear the CPU fan start spinning up.

          I don't know if it is a VP9 or H.264 video or what kind of video it is. I don't know if it is GStreamer or FFmpeg or VA-API or X-Video or whatever it is that handles decoding.

          Why is this?

          Because it isn't using hardware decoding. It isn't possible anymore since they dropped gstreamer support and you can't use gstreamer-vaapi.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Krejzi View Post
            Because it isn't using hardware decoding. It isn't possible anymore since they dropped gstreamer support and you can't use gstreamer-vaapi.
            Even with gstreamer-vaapi, presentation was done in software, so you weren't getting much, if anything. Look at some bugzilla reports, CPU usage was still very high for those few where gstreamer-vaapi worked at all (very often it didn't).

            See what I mean with people only focusing on decoding and forgetting about presentation?
            Last edited by Gusar; 27 May 2016, 02:51 PM.

            Comment


            • #7
              The reason the presentation is done in software is because browsers expose the video frames to javascript and arbitrary css rules that APIs like VDPAU aren't designed to handle. It's something that probably needs to be fixed at some point - there are some good reasons it was done that way, but a lot of video really doesn't need those kinds of abilities and it wastes a lot of unnecessary cpu/power.

              Comment


              • #8
                Awesome! I thought Skylake only supported VP8!

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by smitty3268 View Post
                  The reason the presentation is done in software is because browsers expose the video frames to javascript and arbitrary css rules that APIs like VDPAU aren't designed to handle. It's something that probably needs to be fixed at some point - there are some good reasons it was done that way, but a lot of video really doesn't need those kinds of abilities and it wastes a lot of unnecessary cpu/power.
                  That processing, merging layers could be done on the GPU. I mean, nowadays the GTK+ and others use CSS style theming, yet they support full HW acceleration for video and compositing. The browser is a braindead platform.

                  Comment

                  Working...
                  X