GStreamer Adds NVDEC NVIDIA GPU Decoding Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GStreamer Adds NVDEC NVIDIA GPU Decoding Support

GStreamer now has a plug-in for supporting accelerated video decoding using NVIDIA's VDPAU-successor, NVDEC...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-NVDEC-GStreamer

[Tomin]

Why Nvidia developed NVDEC instead of using VDPAU? I tried to search, but didn't find any answer. Is there any technical reason and will that affect Mesa drivers when they want to support new codecs or resolutions?

[Niarbeht]

Why Nvidia developed NVDEC instead of using VDPAU? I tried to search, but didn't find any answer. Is there any technical reason and will that affect Mesa drivers when they want to support new codecs or resolutions?

Which Mesa drivers? Intel uses and developed VA-API, Nvidia used and developed VDPAU.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/vaapi/

http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/vdpau/doxygen/html/

This might cause issues for nouveau, but as long as Nvidia publishes the specification the way they did with VDPAU, it should be fine. If Nvidia wants to move to something newer on their own code, that's their prerogative.

[Gusar]

Why Nvidia developed NVDEC instead of using VDPAU? I tried to search, but didn't find any answer. Is there any technical reason and will that affect Mesa drivers when they want to support new codecs or resolutions?

NVDEC is cross-platform (works on Windows too, for example "mpv --hwdec=cuda" works on both Linux and Windows), while VDPAU is Linux only. And Nvidia's VDPAU guy is no longer at Nvidia, so that's it for VDPAU. The way this affects Mesa is that the devs add new features to VAAPI but not VDPAU (for example, 10bit HEVC decoding in radeonsi is there for VAAPI but not VDPAU)

[Gusar]

Which Mesa drivers?

Primarily radeonsi, but also nouveau.

This might cause issues for nouveau, but as long as Nvidia publishes the specification the way they did with VDPAU, it should be fine. If Nvidia wants to move to something newer on their own code, that's their prerogative.

Unlike VDPAU, nvdec (previous name for it is cuvid) is proprietary. Sure, it's Nvidia's prerogative to go with it, but it means yet another API to support for application developers, which is a pain in the butt.

[(tpm)]

but it means yet another API to support for application developers, which is a pain in the butt.

Not a problem if they use higher-level APIs such as GStreamer or FFMpeg of course

[starshipeleven]

Not a problem if they use higher-level APIs such as GStreamer or FFMpeg of course

Why having standards when we can add some wrappers on top, right?

Seriously in this case it's not a major issue. Most applications using media are already offloading on Gstreamer or ffmpeg because it makes sense to do so regardless of NVIDIA.

[sarmad]

Unlike VDPAU, nvdec (previous name for it is cuvid) is proprietary.

Is the API itself proprietary, or just the implementation? In other words, can other vendors support NVDEC?

[TheLexMachine]

I have been unable to get a straight answer - well, any answer, really - from The Big N on VDPAU. The dev presentation information from years ago outright states that VDPAU would be dropped by 2016 - to be replaced by NVCUVID, which is now NVENCODE/NVDECODE - and all VDPAU development ceased - not terminated, ceased - without any official notice at the end of 2015, according to the logs. Nvidia has continued to add VDPAU feature sets to the drivers - or so the documentation for these releases claim - without any actual updates to VDPAU to support these new feature sets, so I'm not sure what is going on with the actual state of VDPAU. As it is, NVDECODE is a CUDA process, which means your GPU is going to be using more power than it would with VDPAU and in my case, it's pretty much worthless because it just causes my CPU usage to soar and my GPU temp to go up with it.

[Gusar]

Is the API itself proprietary, or just the implementation? In other words, can other vendors support NVDEC?

I will admit I haven't actually checked the documentation, but I seriously doubt a full specification is available (like there is for VDPAU), just enough to add nvdec to your application, but not enough so that other vendors could write implementations.