Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Experimental FFmpeg Code For Vulkan Acceleration

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

  • Experimental FFmpeg Code For Vulkan Acceleration

    Phoronix: Experimental FFmpeg Code For Vulkan Acceleration

    Prominent FFmpeg developer Cyanreg has begun working on an experimental Vulkan hardware acceleration video decoder for FFmpeg...

    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
    One step towards standardization. Amazing!

    Comment


    • #3
      I wish ffmpeg itself would switch to Gitlab. Their bug tracker is a fossil.

      Comment


      • #4
        Just asking out of curiosity, what exactly is the difference between between the new vulkan video extensions and existing solutions like VAAPI other than vulkan being cross-platform(standardization)? I know they all expose the same hardware encoders/decoders via different APIs but does vulkan offer any improvements in terms of performance? Encoding h264 using AMF instead of VAAPI was considerably faster for me the last time I tried it so I guess there's room for improvement.

        Comment


        • #5
          I believe there's lots of ARM chips that will support Vulkan but not VA-API.
          Last edited by sindr; 18 November 2021, 03:40 PM.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by sindr View Post
            I believe there's lots of ARM chips that will support Vulkan but not VA-API.
            That doesn't mean they will automagically support the Vulkan Video extensions.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by osw89 View Post
              Just asking out of curiosity, what exactly is the difference between between the new vulkan video extensions and existing solutions like VAAPI other than vulkan being cross-platform(standardization)? I know they all expose the same hardware encoders/decoders via different APIs but does vulkan offer any improvements in terms of performance? Encoding h264 using AMF instead of VAAPI was considerably faster for me the last time I tried it so I guess there's room for improvement.
              Theoretically Vulkan could be more modern and avoid some hiccups older technologies could have (like less CPU overhead for doing same stuff). Practically as hardware decoders/encoders don't rely much on how they are called, i believe diffrence should be really minimal in decoding at least. In encoding that depends on a lot more stuff. (there is tons of tweaking during encoding, and hardware encoders strongly depend on codebase there).

              Comment


              • #8
                I hope that in the long run, Vulkan video decoding will end the mess that is accelerated playback and decoding on the various platforms Linux runs on. Especially with single board computers, it's a hit and miss. Webbrowsers might demand VAAPI, but you only got an M2M V4L device or support for the deprecated OpenMAX API.

                This leads to situations where you are limited to use a hacky, patched version of Chromium that's always a few versions behind upstream. Or you want to use an actual video player instead of running ffplay from the terminal, but the applications you'd like to use have issues with or don't support your specific hardware. You see that Kodi is supported just to notice that it has tearing in every video…

                I was especially disappointed with the Raspberry Pi 4 in that regard, considering how long it's already available, that it has the largest community out there when it comes to SBCs and that all the software and relevant spec sheets are open source. Anyhow, things can only get better from here.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by osw89 View Post
                  Just asking out of curiosity, what exactly is the difference between between the new vulkan video extensions and existing solutions like VAAPI other than vulkan being cross-platform(standardization)? I know they all expose the same hardware encoders/decoders via different APIs but does vulkan offer any improvements in terms of performance? Encoding h264 using AMF instead of VAAPI was considerably faster for me the last time I tried it so I guess there's room for improvement.
                  I came here to ask exactly this. I have same problems with two of my Polaris GPUs.

                  Do you compile ffmpeg yourself or does your distro include AMF extentions by default?

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Well, that’s sad. If you follow the github discussion, the ffmpeg dev basically states that the design of Vulkan VA extension is bad and that the way they want to fix it is dirty.

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X