streamer default h265

bendraper

@Alex-Kushleyev it's probably just my gstreamer ignorance and it not being as simple to set up an h265 stream as swapping our h264 with h265

Alex Kushleyev

@bendraper , you got 90% there!

I just tested your version and was able to reproduce the issue, but the following change fixes it:

from

"profile", G_TYPE_STRING, "baseline",

to

"profile", G_TYPE_STRING, "main",

There is no baseline profile in h265. Please try it - i was able to stream h265 with modified voxl-streamer and play using ffplay.

full diff below. We will test more and probably mainline this soon.

Alex

diff --git a/src/pipeline.c b/src/pipeline.c
index 53f47b7..5f88315 100644
--- a/src/pipeline.c
+++ b/src/pipeline.c
@@ -398,9 +398,9 @@ GstElement *create_custom_element(GstRTSPMediaFactory *factory, const GstRTSPUrl
     // g_object_set(context->h264_parser, "alignment", "nal", NULL);
 
     // Configure the OMX encoder
-    g_object_set(context->omx_encoder, "control-rate", 1, 
+    g_object_set(context->omx_h265_encoder, "control-rate", 1, 
                                        "interval-intraframes", 30, NULL);
-    g_object_set(context->omx_encoder, "target-bitrate",
+    g_object_set(context->omx_h265_encoder, "target-bitrate",
                  context->output_stream_bitrate, NULL);
 
     // Configure the RTP input queue
@@ -443,10 +443,10 @@ GstElement *create_custom_element(GstRTSPMediaFactory *factory, const GstRTSPUrl
         gst_caps_unref(filtercaps);
 
         // Configure the caps filter to reflect the output of the OMX encoder
-        filtercaps = gst_caps_new_simple("video/x-h264",
+        filtercaps = gst_caps_new_simple("video/x-h265",
                                         "width", G_TYPE_INT, context->output_stream_width,
                                         "height", G_TYPE_INT, context->output_stream_height,
-                                        "profile", G_TYPE_STRING, "baseline",
+                                        "profile", G_TYPE_STRING, "main",
                                         NULL);
     }
     if ( ! filtercaps) {
@@ -482,10 +482,10 @@ GstElement *create_custom_element(GstRTSPMediaFactory *factory, const GstRTSPUrl
                         context->video_rotate,
                         context->video_rotate_filter,
                         context->encoder_queue,
-                        context->omx_encoder,
+                        context->omx_h265_encoder,
                         context->rtp_filter,
                         context->rtp_queue,
-                        context->rtp_payload,
+                        context->rtp_h265_payload,
                         NULL);
     }
 
@@ -536,10 +536,10 @@ GstElement *create_custom_element(GstRTSPMediaFactory *factory, const GstRTSPUrl
         last_element = context->video_rotate_filter;
         if ( ! gst_element_link_many(last_element,
                                      context->encoder_queue,
-                                     context->omx_encoder,
+                                     context->omx_h265_encoder,
                                      context->rtp_filter,
                                      context->rtp_queue,
-                                     context->rtp_payload,
+                                     context->rtp_h265_payload,
                                      NULL)) {
             M_ERROR("Couldn't finish pipeline linking part 4\n");
             return NULL;

bendraper

@Alex-Kushleyev Incredible, it works! Thanks Alex

Alex Kushleyev

@bendraper , great! Thank you for doing most of the work

I will add an option to specify output encoder type (for the unencoded input case) so h264/5 can be selected via command line argument.

Alex

bendraper

@Alex-Kushleyev Awesome. On a different note, do you know why ffmpeg has no issue with the aspect ratio of the stream but in QGroundControl, the stream seems to be vertically squished? I would guess ffmpeg correctly makes some assumptions about the aspect ratio that voxl-streamer doesn't outwardly declare and maybe QGC doesn't make these assumptions?

Alex Kushleyev

@bendraper , i believe that when the encoder starts producing frames, the first frame is a header frame that has the stream description. This condition is also triggered if client disconnects (encoding stops) and then reconnects, causing the stream to start again. I am not sure what the whole pipeline looks like for getting video to QGC, but if the header is not sent over or is not parsed, this can lead to incorrect stream dimension? However i would assume that is the header is lost, the video would be completely garbled, not just aspect ratio, which probably means that QGC is in fact decoding correctly but simply rendering the image using a fixed aspect ratio…

Alex Kushleyev

I just pushed two updates to a branch of voxl-streamer:

https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/voxl-streamer/-/commits/enable-h265-encode
add option to use h265 encoder for non-encoded input frames (use either command line option -e h265 or --encoder h265 or in voxl-streamer.conf file "encoder": "h264"
switch the h264 profile from baseline to main which allows using CABAC coding, which has better compression properties than default CAVLC at some expense of HW encoder usage (negligible) and potential additional cpu usage on decoding side. However, this will definitely be better for low bandwidth streaming. h265 uses CABAC coding as the only option.

It seems like it's working well, but not much testing has been done so far..

Alex

bendraper

@Alex-Kushleyev This is great, much appreciated! Also regarding that squished stream in QGC, seems to only be a linux thing so probably not much to do about it right now.

Eric Katzfey

@bendraper You can also set the aspect ratio of the video in QGroundControls application settings.

bendraper

@Eric-Katzfey Yea I think that functionality may be broken though. If I try to do the inverse aspect ratio, it just kinda shrinks the stream as opposed to stretching it back out

bendraper

@bendraper said in streamer default h265:

@Eric-Katzfey Yea I think that functionality may be broken though. If I try to do the inverse aspect ratio, it just kinda shrinks the stream as opposed to stretching it back out

It's also seemingly fixed in the daily builds of QGC... Oh well