Hw. acceleration support

UltraGrid supports video encoding and decoding hw. acceleration with VA-API and VDPAU. Currently the acceleration works best with VA-API on Intel and VDPAU on Nvidia proprietary drivers.

AMD support

Linux

Acceleration support on AMD GPUs was tested whith RX 580 GPU on Ubuntu 18.04.02 with following results

VA-API

Encoding

H.264 encoding via VA-API, however the encoded stream produced on clean Ubuntu 18.04.2 install was broken and not decodable. After installing the amdgpu-pro-19.20-812932-ubuntu-18.04 driver and upgrading to linux kernel 5.0.0-17-generic it works correctly.

HEVC encoding via VA-API is broken, produces only artifacts

Decoding

H.264 get's decoded, however the decoded picture contains wrong colors (luma looks alright, looks like a wrong pixel format conversion is used somewhere)

VDPAU

VDPAU decoding for H.264 works, but only in copy mode. It looks like the GL-VDPAU interop doesn't properly map vdpau surfaces to GL textures.

Windows

AMF

Windows encode acceleration with AMF works but doesn't support intra-refresh which means that there will be required larger bandwidth to avoid packet loss due to excessive I-frames.