FFMpeg to use Nvidia Encoder Decoder?

[thebearot]

Hey All,

I believe this question has been asked a while back (via Google Search) but there was no solid response or answer given. I am now raising this question again because of my project.

On my test machine, I have a Intel 2600k + Nvidia 970 running in Ubuntu with FFMpeg compiled with cuda (encoder) and libnpp (decoder). Running this command completely offloads the work to Nvidia 970 (1% CPU Usage) - "./ffmpeg -hwaccel cuda -i input -c:v h264_nvenc -preset slow output.mkv". Without decoder, I get about 13% CPU usage per feed (rtsp) and about 20% per CPU usage without both.

From the above, I take that we can make use of FFMpeg's capability with hardware acceleration. Thus, in motinoplus' camera configurations, I added:

• netcam_high_params hwaccel=cuda,decoder=h264_nvenc
• netcam_params hwaccel=cuda,decoder=h264_nvenc

The params do not work so here I am seeking help on the forum. My aim here is to add more video cards instead of more hosts as I add more cameras. Hopefully someone who's got similar setup working can point me to the right direction.

Thanks!

-T

[Mr-Dave]

I don't have those so it would be hard to test/validate anything. With that said, I would recommend taking a multi-phased approach.

First, tackle the decoding of a rtsp stream. The decoders that are available for the machine are listed in the log. For MotionPlus, only VAAPI is available and it is in the netcam module here . Someone provided a PR for Motion to provide cuda decoding here. But, since this happened after MotionPlus broke away from Motion it didn't make it. And since I don't have that HW, I have no method to implement and test it. The code between Motion and MotionPlus is very similar but not identical so it should be possible for you to cut and paste with just a few revisions.

The next phase would be encoding movies. The preferred option of course is to just avoid it entirely and use the passthrough option....but if the user must, then I'd think that it would be using the preferred codec option as mp4:h264_nvenc

[luqasz]

How to get all available motionplus hardware decoders ?

[Mr-Dave]

For my computer, it is simply netcam_params decoder=vaapi

[luqasz]

Thx. Do you run it as a service via systemd ar root ? Any additional packages installed ? I am running debian.

[luqasz]

When ran as root with vaapi, motionplus segfaults.

[Mr-Dave]

That was fixed recently in the current master branch.

[luqasz]

Thx. I will build from master then.