• Home

  • Custom Ecommerce
  • Application Development
  • Database Consulting
  • Cloud Hosting
  • Systems Integration
  • Legacy Business Systems
  • Security & Compliance
  • GIS

  • Expertise

  • About Us
  • Our Team
  • Clients
  • Blog
  • Careers

  • VisionPort

  • Contact
  • Our Blog

    Ongoing observations by End Point Dev people

    GStreamer Nvenc for Ubuntu 20.04

    Neil Elliott

    By Neil Elliott
    April 22, 2021

    Image by Martin Adams on Unsplash

    GStreamer is a library for creating media-handling components. Using GStreamer you can screencast your desktop, transcode a live stream, or write a media player application for your kiosk.

    Video encoding is expensive, even with AMD’s current lineup making it more palatable. Recent Nvidia Quadro and GeForce video cards include dedicated H.264 encoding and decoding hardware as a set of discrete components alongside the GPU. The hardware is used in the popular Shadowplay toolkit on Windows and available to developers through the Nvidia Video SDK on Linux.

    GStreamer includes elements as part of the “GStreamer Bad” plugin set that leverages the SDK without having to get your hands too dirty. The plugins are not included with gst-plugins-bad in apt, and must be compiled with supporting libraries from Nvidia. Previously this required registering with Nvidia and downloading the Nvidia Video SDK, but Ubuntu recently added apt packages providing them, a big help for automation.

    Environment

    CUDA

    The nvenc and nvdec plugins depend on CUDA 11. The apt version is too old. I’ve found the runfile to be the most reliable installation method. Deselect the nvidia drivers when using the runfile if using the distro-maintained driver.

    Plugin

    Install prerequisites from apt:

    $ apt install nvidia-driver-460 libnvidia-encode-460 libnvidia-decode-460 libdrm-dev
    

    Clone gst-plugins-bad source matching distro version:

    $ git clone --single-branch -b 1.16.2 git://anongit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-plugins-bad
    $ cd gst-plugins-bad
    

    Compile and install plugins:

    $ ./autogen.sh --with-cuda-prefix="/usr/local/cuda"
    $ cd sys/nvenc
    $ make
    $ cp .libs/libgstnvenc.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gstreamer-1.0/
    $ cd ../nvdec
    $ make
    $ cp .libs/libgstnvdec.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gstreamer-1.0/
    

    Clear GStreamer cache and check for dependency issues using gst-inspect:

    $ rm -r ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0
    $ gst-inspect-1.0 | grep 'nvenc\|nvdec'
    nvenc:  nvh264enc: NVENC H.264 Video Encoder
    nvenc:  nvh265enc: NVENC HEVC Video Encoder
    nvdec:  nvdec: NVDEC video decoder
    

    Benchmark

    Here is an example pipeline using the standard CPU-based H.264 encoder to encode 10000 frames at 320x240:

    $ gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc num-buffers=10000 ! x264enc ! h264parse ! mp4mux ! filesink location=vid1.mp4
    

    On my modest machine, this took around 9.6 seconds and 400% CPU.

    Running the same pipeline with the nvenc element:

    $ gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc num-buffers=10000 ! nvh264enc ! h264parse ! mp4mux ! filesink location=vid2.mp4
    

    About 2.3 seconds with 100% CPU.

    Alternatives

    The apt-supported version of these plugins is limited to H.264 and 4K pixels in either dimension. Features have been fleshed out upstream. Elements for the Nvidia Tegra line of mobile processors provide more features, but the required hardware probably isn’t included with your workstation.

    FFmpeg also provides hardware accelerated elements, including nvcodec supported H.264 and HEVC encoders and decoders, out of the box on Ubuntu.

    video ubuntu


    Comments