H.264 SVC / Temporal Encoding Wired Up For AMD's Linux Graphics Driver

For those making use of Radeon GPUs for H.264 encoding on Linux, the open-source Mesa driver stack for VCN hardware has just merged support for handling H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) / temporal encoding.

This merge request from AMD was just merged into Mesa 21.3-devel for expanding its H.264 encode capabilities with Video Core Next.

The H.264 SVC coding specification covers the encoding of video bitstreams that also contain multiple subset bitstreams. Scalable Video Coding supports multiple modalities while the focus of this latest Mesa Git work is around the temporal scalability. H.264 SVC is geared for use in low-bandwidth environments.

This H.264 SVC encode support is enabled for Raven Ridge hardware and newer. Mesa 21.3 is the open-source Linux user-space graphics driver stack feature release that will debut in Q4.