Tag: vaapi

There are, right now, three new GstVA elements merged in main: vah264enc, vacompositor and vajpegdec.

Just to recap, GstVA is a GStreamer plugin in gst-plugins-bad (yes, we agree it’s not a great name anymore), to differentiate it from gstreamer-vaapi. Both plugins use libva to access stateless video processing operations; the main difference is, precisely, how stream’s state is handled: while GstVA uses GStreamer libraries shared by other hardware accelerated plugins (such as d3d11 and v4l2codecs), gstreamer-vaapi uses an internal, tightly coupled and convoluted library.

Also, note that right now (release 1.20) GstVA elements are ranked NONE, while gstreamer-vaapi ones are mostly PRIMARY+1.

Back to the three new elements in GstVA, the most complex one is vah264enc wrote almost completely by He Junyan, from Intel. For it, He had to write a H.264 bitwriter which is, until certain extend, the opposite for H.264 parser: construct the bitstream buffer from H.264 structures such as PPS, SPS, slice header, etc. This API is part of libgstcodecparsers, ready to be reused by other plugins or applications. Currently vah264enc is fairly complete and functional, dealing with profiles and rate controls, among other parameters. It still have rough spots, but we’re working on them. But He Junyan is restless and he already has in the pipeline an encoder common class along with a HEVC and AV1 encoders.

The second element is vacompositor, wrote by Artie Eoff. It’s the replacement of vaapioverlay in gstreamer-vaapi. The suffix compositor is preferred to follow the name of primary video mixing (software-based) element: compositor, successor of videomixer. See this discussion for further details. The purpose of this element is to compose a single video stream from multiple video streams. It works with Intel’s media-driver supporting alpha channel, and also works with AMD Mesa Gallium, but without alpha channel (in other words, a custom degree of transparency).

The last, but not the least, element is vajpegdec, which I worked on. The main issue was not the decoder itself, but jpegparse, which didn’t signal the image caps required for the hardware accelerated decoders. For instance, VA only decodes images with SOF marker 0 (Baseline DCT). It wasn’t needed before because the main and only consumer of the parser is jpegdec which deals with any type of JPEG image. Long story short, we revamped jpegparse and now it signals sof marker, color space (YUV, RGB, etc.) and chroma subsampling (if it has YUV color space), along with comments and EXIF-like metadata as pipeline’s tags. Thus vajpegdec will expose in caps template the supported color space and chroma subsampling supported by the driver. For example, Intel supports (more or less) RGB color space, while AMD Mesa Gallium don’t.

And that’s all for now. Thanks.

It was a year and half ago when I announced a new VA-API H.264 decoder element in gst-plugins-bad. And it was bundled in GStreamer release 1.18 a couple months later. Since then, we have been working adding more decoders and filters, fixing bugs, and enhancing its design. I wanted to publish this blog post as soon as release 1.20 was announced, but, since the developing window is closed, which means no more new features will be included, I’ll publish it now, to create buzz around the next GStreamer release.

Here’s the list of new GstVA decoders (of course, they are only available if your driver supports them):

• vah265dec
• vavp8dec
• vavp9dec
• vaav1dec
• vampeg2dec

Also, there are a couple new features in vah264dec (common to all gstcodecs-based H.264 decoders):

• Supports interlaced streams (vah265dec and vampeg2dec too).
• Added a compliance property to trick the specification conformance for lower the latency, for example, or to enable non-standard features.

But not only decoders, there are two new elements for post-processing:

• vapostproc
• vadeinterlace

vapostproc is similar to vaapipostproc but without the interlace operation, since it was moved to another element. The reason for this is because there are deinterlacing methods which require to hold a list of referenced frames, thus these methods are broken in vaapipostproc, and adding them would increase the complexity of the element with no need. To keep things simple it’s better to handle deinterlacing in a different element.

This is the list of filters and features supported by vapostproc:

• Color conversion
• Resizing
• Cropping
• Color balance (Intel only -so far-)
• Video direction (Intel only)
• Skin tone enhancement (Intel only)
• Denoise and Sharpen (Intel only)

And, I ought to say, HDR is in the pipeline, but it will be released after 1.20.

While vadeinterlace only does that, deinterlacing. But it supports all the available methods currently in the VA-API specification, using the new way to select the field to extract, since the old one (used by GStreamer-VAAPI and FFMPEG) is a bit more expensive.

Finally, both video filters, if they cannot handle the income format, they are configured in passthrough mode.

But there are not only new elements, there’s also a new library!

Since many others elements need to share a common VADisplay in the GStreamer pipeline, the new library expose only the GstVaDisplay object by now. The new library must be thin and lean, exposing only what it’s requested by other elements, such as gst-msdk. We have pending to merge after 1.20, for example, the add of GstContext helpers, and the plan is to expose the allocators and bufferpools later.

Another huge task are encoders. After the freeze, we’ll merge the first
implementation of the H.264 encoder, and add, in different iterations, more encoders.

As I said in the previous blog post, all these elements are ranked as none, so the won’t be autoplugged, for example by playbin. To do so, users need to export the environment variable GST_PLUGIN_FEATURE_RANK as documented.

$ GST_PLUGIN_FEATURE_RANK=vah264dec:MAX,vah265dec:MAX,vampeg2dec:MAX,vavp8dec:MAX,vavp9dec:MAX gst-play-1.0 stream.mp4

Thanks a bunch to He Junyan, Seungha Yang and Nicolas Dufresne, for all the effort and care.

Still, the to-do list is large enough. Just to share what I have in my notes:

• Add a new upload method in glupload to interop with VA surfaces — though this hardly will be merged since it creates a circular dependency between -base and -bad.
• vavc1dec — it might need a rewrite of vc1parse.
• vajpegdec — it needs a rewrite of jpegparse.
• vaalphacombine — decoding alpha channel with VA within vp9alphacodebin and vp8alphacodebin
• vamixer — similar to compositor, glmixer or vaapioverlay, to compose a single frame from different video streams.
• And encoders (mainly H.264 and H.265).

As a final mode, GStreamer-VAAPI has enter into maintenance mode. The general plan, without any promise or dates, is to deprecate it when most of its use cases were covered by GstVA.

Recently, a new H.264 decoder, using VA-API, was merged in gst-plugins-bad.

Why another VA-based H.264 decoder if there is already gstreamer-vaapi?

As usual, an historical perspective may give some clues.

It started when Seungha Yang implemented the GStreamer decoders for Windows using DXVA2 and D3D11 APIs.

Perhaps we need one step back and explain what are stateless decoders.

Video decoders are magic and opaque boxes where we push encoded frames, and later we’ll pop full decoded frames in raw format. This is how OpenMAX and V4L2 decoders work, for example.

Internally we can imagine those magic and opaque boxes has two main operations:

• Codec state handling
• Signal processing like Fourier-related transformations (such as DCT), entropy coding, etc. (DSP, in general)

The codec state handling basically extracts, from the stream, the frame’s parameters and its compressed data, so the DSP algorithms can decode the frames. Codec state handling can be done with generic CPUs, while DSP algorithms are massively improved through specific purpose processors.

These video decoders are known as stateful decoders, and usually they are distributed through binary and closed blobs.

Soon, silicon vendors realized they can offload the burden of state handling to third-party user-space libraries, releasing what it is known as stateless decoders. With them, your code not only has to push frames into the opaque box, but now it shall handle the codec specifics to provide all the parameters and references for each frame. VAAPI and DXVA2 are examples of those stateless decoders.

Returning to Seungha’s implementation, in order to get theirs DXVA2/D3D11 decoders, they also needed a state handler library for each codec. And Seungha wrote that library!

Initially they wanted to reuse the state handling in gstreamer-vaapi, which works pretty good, but its internal library, from the GStreamer perspective, is over-engineered: it is impossible to rip out only the state handling without importing all its data types. Which is kind of sad.

Later, Nicolas Dufresne, realized that this library can be re-used by other GStreamer plugins, because more stateless decoders are now available, particularly V4L2 stateless, in which he is interested. Nicolas moved Seungha’s code into a library in gst-plugins-bad.

Currently, libgstcodecs provides state handling of H.264, H.265, VP8 and VP9.

Let’s return to our original question: Why another VA-based H.264 decoder if there is already one in gstreamer-vaapi?

The quick answer is «to pay my technical debt».

As we already mentioned, gstreamer-vaapi is big and over-engineered, though we have being simplifying the internal libraries, in particular He Junyan, has done a lot of work replacing the internal base class, GstVaapiObject, withGstObject or GstMiniObject. Also, this kind of projects, where there’s a lot of untouched code, it carries a lot of cargo cult decisions.

So I took the libgstcodecs opportunity to write a simple, thin and lean, H.264 decoder, using VA new API calls (vaExportSurfaceHandle(), for example) and learning from other implementations, such as FFMpeg and ChromeOS. This exercise allowed me to identify where are the dusty spots in gstreamer-vaapi and how they should be fixed (and we have been doing it since then!).

Also, this opportunity lead me to learn a bit more about the H.264 specification since I implemented the reference picture list handling, and fixed a small bug in Chromium.

Now, let me be crystal clear: GStreamer VA-API is not going anywhere. It is, right now, one of the most feature-complete implementations using VA-API, even with its integration issues, and we are working on them, particularly, Intel folks are working hard on a new AV1 decoder, enhancing encoders and adding new video post-processing features.

But, this new vah264dec is an experimental VA-API decoder, which aims towards a tight integration with GStreamer, oriented to provide a good experience in most of the common use cases and to enhance the common libgstcodecs library shared with other stateless decoders, looking to avoid Intel specific nuances.

These are the main characteristics and plans of this new decoder:

• It use, by default, a DRM connection to VA display, avoiding the troubles of choosing X11 or Wayland.
  • It uses the first found DRM device as VA display
  • In the future, users will be able to provide their custom VA display through the pipeline’s context.
• It requires libva >= 1.6
• No multiview/stereo profiles, neither interlaced streams, because libgstcodecs doesn’t handle them yet
• It is incompatible with gstreamer-vaapi: mixing elements might lead to problems.
• Even if memory:VAMemory is exposed, it is not handled yet by any other element yet.
  • Users will get VASurfaces via mapping as GstGL does with textures.
• Caps templates are generated dynamically generated by querying VAAPI
• YV12 and I420 are added for system memory caps because they seem to be supported for all the drivers when downloading frames onto main memory, as they are used by xvimagesink and others, avoiding color conversion.
• Decoding surfaces aren’t bounded to context, so they can grow beyond the DBP size, allowing smooth reverse playback.
• There isn’t yet error handling and recovery.
• The element is supposed to spawn if different renderD nodes with VA-API driver support are found (like gstv4l2), but it hasn’t been tested yet.

Now you may be asking how do I use vah264dec?

Currently vah264dec has NONE rank, which means that it will never be autoplugged, but you can use the trick of the environment variable GST_PLUGIN_FEATURE_RANK:

$ GST_PLUGIN_FEATURE_RANK=vah264dec:259 gst-play-1.0 ~/video.mp4

And that’s it!

Thanks.