AMD hardware accelerated h264 encoding: VCE Video Codec Engine

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AMD Open-Sources VCE Video Encode Engine Code and AMD Publishes New Code For Open-Source VCE Video Encode

initial VCE support based on OpenMAX

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2017-07-29 20:06:43: nathan-renniewaldock commented

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What's the status on this? Is AMD VCE still not supported?

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No progress, as I don't have the hardware. (or the time)

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meh, #451 will do for now.

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The easier way of supporting this is via #3706

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That said, on MS Windows (ie: #4418), it may be easier to implement native bindings.
Some links:

• wikipedia: Video Core Next
• Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK

Apparently, my new AMD 5700G is a "Cezanne" part, which means it supports VCN 2.2

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I've tried again on Fedora because that's a much more comfortable environment for me, so here are some notes:

• AMF is part of the proprietary components
• vainfo shows:

  Trying display: wayland
  libva info: VA-API version 1.22.0
  libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri-nonfree/radeonsi_drv_video.so
  libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri-freeworld/radeonsi_drv_video.so
  libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so
  libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_22
  libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
  vainfo: VA-API version: 1.22 (libva 2.22.0)
  vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 24.3.2 for AMD Radeon Graphics (radeonsi, renoir, LLVM 19.1.5, DRM 3.59, 6.12.7-200.fc41.x86_64)
  vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
        VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointVLD
        VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointVLD
        VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointVLD
        VAProfileVP9Profile0            :	VAEntrypointVLD
        VAProfileVP9Profile2            :	VAEntrypointVLD
        VAProfileNone                   :	VAEntrypointVideoProc
  

  so the H264 encoder is missing via libva..
• AMDGPU Driver Installation on Linux
• AMF probably is not used much on Linux, because the repository contains outdated paths
• the fedora repos have AMF-devel-1.4.35-1.fc41.noarch and AMF-samples-1.4.35-1.fc41.noarch but they're a bit broken and require paths to be mangled before we can build the samples
• amdgpu-install can be installed from the radeon RHEL repos: https://repo.radeon.com/amdgpu-install/latest/el/
  just choose the latest RHEL9 release and then edit the repo files to hardcode the RHEL version (at time of writing I used 9.6) since Fedora is at 41, but the proprietary repo is missing, and amdgpu-install -y --usecase=amf wants to install amf-amdgpu-pro which does not exist.. Similar instructions can be found here: Install AMDGPU HiP, OpenCL on Fedora 40
• https://github.com/CosmicFusion/fedora-amdgpu-pro says AMD proprietary AMF is virtually useless on AMD hardware ... it's now actually universally useless and The only requirement to use the AMF encoder is that it requires the PRO driver to be used

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That said, the docs seem pretty good:
Advanced Media Framework – Practical Guide for Video CODEC Encoder App Developers
GPU and APU HW Features and Support: All codecs are 4:2:0 Ouch!

My Ryzen 5700G is listed as : Ryzen 5xxx, Cezanne, VCN, 2.0, 1 VCN - this can support AVC and HEVC at 4K, but not AV1.

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Mostly working, just not as efficiently as I would like:

• extra pixel copy to CPU buffer - I can't figure out how to avoid it, maybe CreateTexture2D requires specific values to interoperate with AMF? "staging usage" perhaps?
• busy wait for completion - not sure what else we can do since we want blocking behaviour

Still TODO:

• handle more pixel formats
• avoid scary warnings when probing for encodings that aren't supported by the GPU
• do enable those that work after probing, which may require specific pixel formats to enable
• AMF Display Capture #4479 and AMD Video Decoding #4480
• port to Linux + OpenGL buffers - test on AlmaLinux 9, should work: AMD sponsors AlmaLinux
• unroll [do]_compress_image
• packaging updates
• enable it on the MS Windows build machine

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For MS Windows builds:

cat > /mingw64/lib/pkgconfig/amf.pc << EOF
amf_prefix=E:/AMF-1.4.35/amf/public

Name: amf
Description: AMF codec implementation
Version: 1.0
Requires:
Conflicts:
# Libs: -L${libdir} -lamf
Cflags: -I${amf_prefix}/include/
EOF