HW Accelerated VP8/VP9 encoding on VOXL2

[milanerd]

Hello everyone,

I searched the forum, but couldn't find anything related to VP8/VP9 encoding.

What approach do you recommend for hardware accelerated VP8/VP9 video encoding on VOXL2?

Thank you in advance for help.

[Alex Kushleyev]

@milanerd , we have not tested VP8/VP9 encoding on VOXL2 although the hardware encoder may support it (based on the following specs : https://docs.qualcomm.com/bundle/publicresource/topics/80-PV086-1/introduction.html )

The best way to test it would be using gstreamer (which is installed on VOXL2 and has support for the hardware encoder) and set up the gstreamer pipeline to use the VP8/9 encoder.

Running gst-inspect-1.0 on VOXL2, you will find that the vpx plugin supports vp8 and vp9 encoding, but it looks like a standard linux driver, so it is probably not using the Qualcomm hardware.

OMX plugin does use the hardware encoder, but it seems like it only supports H264/5. Voxl-camera-server and voxl-streamer both use the OMX interface to the hardware encoder (and we support h264/5 only)

You could use the voxl-streamer project for testing purposes and try to modify it to use the VP8/9 encoder : https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/voxl-streamer or construct a gstreamer pipeline (using gst-launch-1.0) and see if you can get it to use vp8/9 encoder and check for hints (whether it is using sw or hw) in the debug prints using logcat, as well as checking cpu usage.

Alex

[milanerd]

Thank you for your help and hints Alex. We will definitely try to use voxl-streamer and modify it for VP8.

Thank again,
Milan