No more hardware encoding on Raspberry Pi 4 after 4.5.3 upgrade

[Ellimist 5]

Hi,

The Raspberry Pi 4 has had the option for OpenMax and V4L2 H.264 encoding for the last few months. But encoding is being done on the CPU ever since the upgrade to 4.5.3. Note that the new version apparently also adds support for OpenMax decoding (or maybe it's the operating system that's finally exposing those encoders), but neither the hardware encoder or decoder is being used in the new version.

Logs and MediaInfo attached.

ffmpeg-transcode-b2432380-f6cb-4bb2-90dd-9aaad7802918_1.txt mediainfo.txt

Edited December 10, 2020 by Ellimist

[softworkz 5066]

@Ellimist - No change has been made to this for a long time.

Could you post an ffmpeg log from your previous Emby version showing it working?

[Ellimist 5]

I downgraded to 4.5.1.0 and used OpenMax (h264_omx) hardware encoder which seemed to work. As far as I can remember, it worked on 4.5.2 too.

 

ffmpeg-transcode-005c26d7-d41b-4d09-9fc3-a7c0f1c070d9_1.txt

Edited December 11, 2020 by Ellimist

[softworkz 5066]

This is from a totally different OS version than the other ffmpeg log..

[Ellimist 5]

Right, I ran kernel upgrades between yesterday and today. Here are logs from right now, on the same OS version, on the same file - for 4.5.1 and 4.5.3.

4.5.1.txt 4.5.3.txt

Edited December 11, 2020 by Ellimist

[softworkz 5066]

Thank you very much for creating those logs. These are very helpful.

Please hold on, I need to check back internally what has happened.

[Ellimist 5]

Thank you for taking the time to look into this. The hardware acceleration speedup isn't much but it makes the transcoding speed more than 1x and is the difference between choppy and smooth playback.

Thanks again. Software devs aren't appreciated much, but I appreciate the work you guys do!

[softworkz 5066]

Thanks. The key issue here is that there are two very different ffmpeg builds. I don't know what happened here, but we will find out...

[Luke 42078]

@Ellimist are you still running into this with Emby Server 4.5.4?

[Ellimist 5]

I can hardware encode using the OMX encoder on v4.5.4 again.

I was aware of v4.5.4 being released and looked at the release notes and looks like nothing was fixed regarding this, so I didn't test it out. But it looks like it did! Thanks for your hard work on this!

[Luke 42078]

Thanks for the feedback !