What do you know about video decoding/encoding?

A few weeks ago I watched Victor's excellent talk on Vulkan Video. This made me question my skills in this area. I'm pretty vague on video processing hardware, I really have no understanding of H264 or any of the standards. I've been loosely following the Vulkan video group inside of Khronos, but I can't say I've understood it or been useful.

radeonsi has a gallium vaapi driver, that talks to firmware driver encoder on the hardware, surely copying what it is programming can't be that hard. I got an mpv/vaapi setup running and tested some videos on that setup just to get comfortable. I looked at what sort of data was being pushed about.

The thing is the firmware is doing all the work here, the driver is mostly just responsible for taking semi-parsed h264 bitstream data structures and giving them in memory buffers to the fw API. Then the resulting decoded image should be magically in a buffer.

I then got the demo nvidia video decoder application mentioned in Victor's talk.

I ported the code to radv in a couple of days, but then began a long journey into the unknown. The firmware is quite expectant on exactly what it wants and when it wants it. After fixing some interactions with the video player, I started to dig.

Now vaapi and DXVA (Windows) are context based APIs. This means they are like OpenGL, where you create a context, do a bunch of work, and tear it down, the driver does all the hw queuing of commands internally. All the state is held in the context. Vulkan is a command buffer based API. The application records command buffers and then enqueues those command buffers to the hardware itself.

So the vaapi driver works like this for a video

create hw ctx, flush, decode, flush, decode, flush, decode, flush, decode, flush, destroy hw ctx, flush

However Vulkan wants things to be more like

Create Session, record command buffer with (begin, decode, end) send to hw, (begin, decode, end), send to hw, End Sesssion

There is no way at the Create/End session time to submit things to the hardware.

After a week or two of hair removal and insightful irc chats I stumbled over a decent enough workaround to avoid the hw dying and managed to decode a H264 video of some jellyfish.

The work is based on bunch of other stuff, and is in no way suitable for upstreaming yet, not to mention the Vulkan specification is only beta/provisional so can't be used anywhere outside of development.

The preliminary code is in my gitlab repo here[1]. It has a start on h265 decode, but it's not working at all yet, and I think the h264 code is a bit hangy randomly.

I'm not sure where this is going yet, but it was definitely an interesting experiment.

[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/airlied/mesa/-/commits/radv-vulkan-video-prelim-decode

Comments

  1. Stuart5 November 2021 at 06:37

    This post is a bit of a tease - you explained the problem of the different expectations about what order things should happen in, and then said you found a decent workaround... but didn't say what the workaround is or how you bridged the inconsistency. You Fermat's Last Theorem'd us!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dave Airlie7 November 2021 at 18:05

      There is video playing in some cases, I suspect the workaround is just hiding another bug, I found one with internal command buffer alignment that is pretty suspect.

      Delete

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