FFMPEG Hardware Encoding H264

Question

I'm currently trying to use FFMPEG with Hardware/GPU Encoding with the H264 Codec.

What I do is, I pipe raw data direclty into ffmpeg to output them to a udp stream. Those are my settings:

var ffmpegArgs = [
    '-c:v', 'rawvideo',// input container
    '-f', 'rawvideo',
    '-pix_fmt', 'rgba', // input pixel format
    '-s', '600x600', //input size
    '-video_size', '600x600',
    '-i', 'pipe:0', // input source
    '-f', 'mpegts', // output container format
    '-s', '600x600',
    '-video_size', '600x600',
    '-c:v', 'libx264', // output video codec
    '-b:v', '1m', // output bitrate
    'udp://239.255.123.46:1234' // output destination
];

And in generally it is working, but with really miserable quality and latency. The frames are like 5 seconds behind and then have lots of bugs in them so it takes at least 10 or 15 seconds to see the hole frame (the video is a "live stream" from a canvas).

However I thought that GPU Encoding might help here, but I don't get this working. I'm trying to use VAAPI, but no matter which command from ffmpeg I'm trying to use (descirbed here), it's not working....

I'm trying to run this on a Intel NUC (this one) on an Ubuntu 16.04.

Are there any tips on how I can get this running?

Answer 1

The encoder you're using, libx264, does not implement hardware-accelerated encoding. Only (some) OpenCL-accelerated look-ahead function(s) are available, and performance gains from that are at best, marginal, especially on high-end systems. To expose look-ahead accelerated look-ahead in that library, ensure that an OpenCL ICD and OpenCL headers are present on the system and that the option --disable-opencl is omitted at x264's configuration phase. Likewise, for FFmpeg, ensure that --enable-opencl is enabled at the configuration phase.

Take a look at similar answers provided on queries regarding hardware-accelerated encoding with FFmpeg.

1. With NVENC.

2. With QuickSync (which requires the Intel Media SDK to be installed when configuring and building FFmpeg).

3. With VAAPI.

And the FFmpeg wiki on hardware acceleration.