AMD Adds AV1 Video Encoding Support To Mesa VA-API

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Adds AV1 Video Encoding Support To Mesa VA-API

AMD has contributed support to Mesa's VA-API Gallium3D state tracker for supporting AV1 video encoding...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Mesa-AV1-VA-API-Encode

[shmerl]

Nice! Now something like OBS should start using that.

[MorrisS.]

Is there any news about modern entry level AMD GPUs?

[Danny3]

That's great, but will it be at the same quality as the AV1 encodes done by the CPU?
I hate to see hardware encoding, but then to realize that it produces bad quality encodes as the developers took shortcuts and made compromises.

[microchip8]

That's great, but will it be at the same quality as the AV1 encodes done by the CPU?
I hate to see hardware encoding, but then to realize that it produces bad quality encodes as the developers took shortcuts and made compromises.

It won't . All GPU encoders I've encountered so far across various formats (H.264, H.265, VP9, etc) have always been worse quality than software ones. This is not going to change anytime soon. You want quality? Go for software encoding and take the hit in slower encoding. In a hurry? Go for GPU encoding.

[piotrj3]

It won't . All GPU encoders I've encountered so far across various formats (H.264, H.265, VP9, etc) have always been worse quality than software ones. This is not going to change anytime soon. You want quality? Go for software encoding and take the hit in slower encoding. In a hurry? Go for GPU encoding.

That kinda depends on preset you use in software encoding. But generally speaking for x264/x265 medium you pretty much mostly win vs hardware encoders, but Nvidia/Intel's hardware encoders come pretty close to that medium preset. AMD is significantly behind tho in x264/x265.

[BlueCrayon]

It won't . All GPU encoders I've encountered so far across various formats (H.264, H.265, VP9, etc) have always been worse quality than software ones. This is not going to change anytime soon. You want quality? Go for software encoding and take the hit in slower encoding. In a hurry? Go for GPU encoding.

No, because they're made with game streaming in mind (twitch, youtube live streams), not offline media recoding

[NeedleInHaystack]

Is there any news about modern entry level AMD GPUs?

The yet smallest 7600 is supposed to be available by 25th May (TPU). Sadly no info on anything below that.

[You-]

Now it needs to provide a repository that distros can link to to provide these bits to all users without making the distro developers having to worry about who has to pay for the patents. (AMD already pays, but their payments only matter when they are the "last integrator", which will not be the case if a distro includes this by default.)

They either need to ship this in their own repo, or piggy back off the openh264 repository if they can legally do that.

[shmerl]

It's showing up!

vainfo: VA-API version: 1.17 (libva 2.12.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 23.2.0-devel for AMD Radeon Graphics (gfx1100, LLVM 16.0.2, DRM 3.52, 6.3.0)
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
...
     VAProfileAV1Profile0            : VAEntrypointVLD
     VAProfileAV1Profile0            : VAEntrypointEncSlice
...
​