GStreamer Lands New NVIDIA Video Encoder Implementation

For those relying on software that leverages the GStreamer multimedia framework and you use the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack on Windows or Linux, with the next release you will be able to enjoy a better NVIDIA GPU-based video encoding experience.

GStreamer has landed a rewritten NVIDIA video encoding implementation. This new NVCODEC implementation works for both Windows and Linux using the proprietary driver's NVENC interface as with the NVIDIA Video Codec SDK that is part of CUDA. The GStreamer NVIDIA bits for both H.264 and H.265 are affected by this new implementation. The new implementation does drop the OpenGL path, RGBA support, and subsampled planar format support, but its new design does allow for better performance.

This new NVIDIA encoder implementation supports zero-copy memory handling for better performance. This new encoder has been tested to perform better than the old NVIDIA encode implementation in GStreamer while also consuming less GPU memory.

More details on this new NVIDIA encoder implementation for GStreamer via this merge request that landed on Wednesday.