Vulkan SDK Updated With Vulkan Video Support

[Quackdoc]

"The Alliance for Open Media is a continuation of Google's efforts with the WebM project"

and Youtube is from.... SURPRISE!

greetings

pretty much every streaming service is migrating to AV1, netflix, hulu, amazon off the top of my hand

[sl1pkn07]

The most used video platform, Youtube, uses AV1 pretty widely.

"The Alliance for Open Media is a continuation of Google's efforts with the WebM project"

and Youtube is from.... SURPRISE!

greetings

[piotrj3]

Not yet, there's no encoder support.

https://github.com/nvpro-samples/vk_video_samples

There are already some basic examples of encoding using VK_VIDEO_ENCODE. Vulkan video intends to do decoding/encoding/transcoding. In fact it supports both Windows and Linux according to what Nvidia claims.

[piotrj3]

Oh wow! I stand corrected (I totally missed that in the article). But I am genuinely surprised that NVIDIA built support for this into their drivers, even going back all the way to Maxwell.

This is genuinely a step forward into the right direction (a unified video decode and encode path for Linux).

Nvidia in fact is primary proposing force in vulkan video. When vulkan video was initially proposed as whole Nvidia instantly provided drivers that supported new experimental extensions for it.

[Quackdoc]

I was mainly thinking about nVidia's binary drivers (I'm still on a GeForce GTX750), where hardware decoding tends to be entirely their responsibility on Linux with no option I've ever run across to pay extra for a license.

yeah that would make sense I suppose, im not sure if nvidia is distributing this to distros? but I guess it might count as that. boy, licencing is complicated xD

[smitty3268]

The decision by the Khronos Group to focus on the latter two first was a disgraceful one, and should have received more pushback from the open source community.

Why? Khronos is an industry group, not a FOSS one. Of course they are going to focus on what is the current industry standard, before pivoting to more future-looking tech. That's their whole purpose, they aren't a FOSS organization.

[ssokolow]

Will that actually be the case? Afaik, the whole reason you can’t ship it is because the license doesn’t carry over to users who buy said GPUs. I don’t see how that would change with this vulkan extension.

I was mainly thinking about nVidia's binary drivers (I'm still on a GeForce GTX750), where hardware decoding tends to be entirely their responsibility on Linux with no option I've ever run across to pay extra for a license.

[Berniyh]

And have you seen which companies have joined the Alliance for Open Media? Even Apple is a member.

It would be surprising if they weren't.
Encode-once-serve-many is where AV1 really shines. There it'll save you money because it'll save you bandwidth.
And well, Apple also runs a streaming service.

[SteamPunker]

The most used video platform, Youtube, uses AV1 pretty widely.

Indeed. And so does Netflix.

And have you seen which companies have joined the Alliance for Open Media? Even Apple is a member.

AV1 is gaining traction, and its support should have been prioritized in Vulkan over h.264 and h.265. I stand by what I wrote earlier. The decision by the Khronos Group to focus on the latter two first was a disgraceful one, and should have received more pushback from the open source community.

[cooperate]

Wouldn't focusing on the patent-encumbered stuff first be sort of like Cisco's OpenH264 module for Firefox? Relying on your GPU vendor to buy a decoding license so you don't have to either pay again or futz around with technically-illegal packages on your Fedora?

Will that actually be the case? Afaik, the whole reason you can’t ship it is because the license doesn’t carry over to users who buy said GPUs. I don’t see how that would change with this vulkan extension.