AMD Adds AV1 Video Encoding Support To Mesa VA-API

[MorrisS.]

You have actually looked at the power draw on a modern GPU right? They often pull a lot more than a CPU (Not counting AMD 7xxxX3D I guess.. they're getting so hot they're frying themselves). Sure, they're faster, but are they fast enough to beat the more energy efficient CPU? Probably not enough to matter. Besides, some CPUs also have encoding acceleration instructions. Intel will probably be integrating AV1 encoding soon enough if they haven't already (I don't remember if they have). Once you look at the newer ARM systems power draw while encoding, traditional discrete GPUs aren't even in the running - unless you're a gamer who streams in which case you need the PC/discrete GPU anyway so you might as well use it for your live streams - so long as it doesn't lag your game.

But really, I don't think many people are going to care a lot. x264 will be what most people encode to for the foreseeable future because it's the default in most creation software and nearly everyone is going to just take the defaults. Most hardware encoders & decoders handle it natively. It'll only change when the creation software packages change their default encoding. They can let their streaming service handle the transcoding to other formats if necessary. I just graduated from college last year (yay!). There were several classes where making videos was necessary. I spoke to fellow classmates to see what they used, settings and the like. Almost no one ever bothered changing the default encoding formats regardless of the program they used and it was universally x.264. Many weren't even aware there were options. I think I was the only one even in the technical classes that changed them to suit what I wanted for that particular assignment or circumstance. It was a tad bit weird to see at least half the computer technical students weren't very adventurous when it came to exploring software.

end-users could take benefit from hardware acceleration... so the alternative to a low-end GPU is an integrated GPU into the CPU. It's long time since low end GPUs were introduced. The last one has been the Gt1030 by Nvidia. Now it seems that LUMA has provided 2 solutions for industrial aims.

[lejeczek]

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.

There will be no need to pay for the patents, not fiscally at least. AV1 is so called "royalty-free" standard. From what I remembered members of the consortium - which AMD is a member of, If am not mistaken - already agreed to required concessions & obligations, which steam from the agreement(s).
Theoretical issues might be argued if people/distros down the stream, were to change, amend the code - and inasmuch at that is a certainty, it should happen in a way of contributions back into AMD's own code repository, so...
But.. certainly would be great to have a (semi)official statement on that, from the AMD(and the AOM)

[tildearrow]

I thought Intel already did?

[pharmasolin]

I think that was Windows only. Not Linux + VAAPI.

OBS on Ubuntu 22.04
image.png

[shmerl]

OBS on Ubuntu 22.04
image.png

That's CPU option, not GPU. CPU one is still very slow.

[Quackdoc]

OBS on Ubuntu 22.04
image.png

wait, no SVT? thats an... odd choice

[TuesdayPogo]

This is why I'm not buying any GPU this year: so many things are finally getting a full, true generational update. I could get the AMD 6000s or RTX 3000s which is attainable in my country, but I'd be losing out on full AV1 encode-decode which would be great future proofing. And the same applies to motherboard, CPU, and RAM. Might as well wait for 2024 to build an entirely new system.