https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-video-codec-sdk, new features that might be of interest to us:
HEVC hardware encoding would be worth testing.
Initial support added in r11471.
Summary of the most noteworthy changes (excluding various indentation changes and typos we can ignore, new constants, etc):
NVENCAPI_STRUCT_VERSION
is packed differently now - genius, so version 6.0 looks like 0.6 (wtf!)
NV_ENC_H264_PROFILE_PROGRESSIVE_HIGH_GUID
ARGB
, ARGB10
and AYUV
- so it looks like we can do transparency?
_NV_ENC_CONFIG_HEVC
has changed, a lot
It looks like a GTX 980 or newer is required for testing HEVC..
Improvements and fixes in r11815, r11816, r11817 (most of which should be backported)
Support code added in r11818 so we can at least try to probe HEVC... (still failing). Will need to compare API parameters between the C client and the Cython version. This works:
./NvEncoder -codec 1 -i /opt/nvenc4/Samples/YUV/1080p/HeavyHandIdiot.3sec.yuv -size 1920 1080 -o test.hevc
But our selftests do not.
Instrumenting the C and Cython versions to dump the contents of the NV_ENC_INITIALIZE_PARAMS
structure, I can see that most of the structure is empty (as expected), the differences are:
060005f06227c86b634ea44caa851e50f321f6bf05b7dfb2bd4e494c9b5f24a7 77d3e587800700003804000080070000380400001e0000000100000000000000 0100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000007854e70100000000 8007000038040000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
060005f06227c86b634ea44caa851e50f321f6bf05b7dfb2bd4e494c9b5f24a7 77d3e58780070000400400008007000040040000010000001e00000000000000 010000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000905ba6d30f560000 8007000040040000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
060005f088dc0c7922457b4d9425bda9975f760305b7dfb2bd4e494c9b5f24a7 77d3e587800700003804000080070000380400001e0000000100000000000000 01000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000078a4400100000000 8007000038040000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
060005f088dc0c7922457b4d9425bda9975f7603c521df49fa6deb4f97876acc 9effb72620000000200000002000000020000000010000001e00000000000000 01000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000070b17cd342560000 2000000020000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
debug init structure and force default preset
With the patch above applied, the structure is closer to the C version:
060005f088dc0c7922457b4d9425bda9975f760305b7dfb2bd4e494c9b5f24a7 77d3e58720000000200000002000000020000000010000001e00000000000000 01000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000070054a3d67550000 2000000020000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
HEVC works as of r11896. The trick was to discover that HEVC has an undocumented minimum size of 72x72.. The tests need improving so we can feed better test input into the encoder, but with the (crappy) existing tests it looks like HEVC is marginally slower than H264 (~15%) at the same resolution and settings, but compresses at lot better. (TBC)
The big disappointment is that it does not perform any better at higher resolutions (even with the low-latency profiles), and it has the same limits as h264: 4096x4096 maximum size. (this is currently hardcoded in our codec, we should be probing it instead: FIXME added in r11897) Let's hope that other implementations deliver better performance. (#451?). This will do for now.
Test related fix in r11895. (could be backported - may apply to libvpx testing)
this ticket has been moved to: https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/issues/1046