MX 17 Repository: The FFMpeg thread

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Stevo
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MX 17 Repository: The FFMpeg thread

#1 Post by Stevo »

Astute update watchers may have noticed an upgrade to the 3.3.4 ffmpeg and libav* libraries shipped with MX 17/18 come down the pipe into main. This turned out to be necessary because of our newly upgraded libva* libraries (va-api hardware decoding and encoding, mainly for Intel GPUs) required that ffmpeg needed to be rebuilt against them instead of the stock Stretch versions; otherwise va-api was broken.

I also fixed the ffmpeg 4.0.3 in MX 17 testing the same way. I've found that QMPlay2 is the easiest program to test if va-api hardware decoding is working on your machine; just switch between the FFMpeg decoder and FFMpeg VA-API decoder at the top of the Decoders Priority in Playback Settings, and try and play some 4K video, like the Elysium movie trailer. (Intel GPU users need to install i965-va-driver, also just updated to support newer hardware; maybe we should include this on the ISO) CPU use can then be monitored in Conky or in "top", among many other options.

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Stevo
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Re: MX 17 Repository: The FFMpeg thread

#2 Post by Stevo »

I just backported FFMpeg 4.1 to support Handbrake 1.2.0 package builds. At first, after installing Handbrake from my local repo, it threw a va-api error:

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/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/i965_drv_video.so has no function __vaDriverInit_0_32
but that error went away after I also upgraded libavcodec-extra, and now Handbrake seems to have hardware-accelerated transcoding using my Intel GPU! Woot!

So for those that are having trouble with va-api encoding with our standard ffmpeg, perhaps installing libavcodec-extra will fix that.

The new packages should be in the test repo soon. FFMpeg 4.1 upgrades smoothly over 4.0.3, and won't affect older libav* packages, such as libavcodec57.

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Re: MX 17 Repository: The FFMpeg thread

#3 Post by Stevo »

4.1 is now in the test repo. Remember that you have to disable "hide libs and dev packages" in the MX Package installer if you want libavcodec-extra to be available, which may allow va-api hardware encoding to work (needs testing).

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Re: MX 17 Repository: The FFMpeg thread

#4 Post by Stevo »

Fffmpeg was upgraded to the new 4.1.3 release in Buster as a security update, even though after the freeze, so that version has also been backported to the MX 17/18 test repo as well. Va-api hardware acceleration still works with players built against the former 4.1.1 release that are in the test repo.

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Re: MX 17 Repository: The FFMpeg thread

#5 Post by Stevo »

We now have a rebuild of the 4.1.4 ffmpeg packages in the test repo that adds the NVENC hardware-accelerated codecs for Nvidia cards using the proprietary driver, or so we hope! :crossfingers: :crossfingers:

We have had a few requests for this feature, so hopefully we can have some testers confirm that it's working. It's supposed to work up to and including the 418.74 Nvidia driver; there were some newer headers available, but the note said they were for the 430 driver only.

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Re: MX 17 Repository: The FFMpeg thread

#6 Post by Stevo »

FFmpeg 4.2.1, backported from Sid, is now in the test repo. Va-api didn't break when I upgraded it to 4.2.1 on MX 19, and in fact, VLC seemed to work better with the sharpening video effect enabled on my test 4K h.264 file, so I don't anticipate it breaking on other multimedia apps as long as they are also the test repo versions.

FFmpeg is again built with nvenc support.

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