如何在Android上使用GStreamer的硬件加速视频编码？

Question

I am trying to design hardware accelerated video encoder based on Android. I have done research for some time but I did not find much useful.

Anyway, I saw the Gstreamer ( http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/ ). It is said this can provide hardware video encoder. However, after I read the manual, I found nothing about encoder.

Does anyone know about this stuff? Thank you!

Answer 1

It's going to be dependent on your hardware. What device are you running on?

If your processor contains an IP core that implements video encoding/decoding, the manufacturer needs to either offer a driver so you can call this hardware, or ideally go a step further and offer a specific plugin for GStreamer that does it.

For example, the Freescale i.MX6 processor (used in the Wandboard and CuBox ) has a driver maintained by Freescale: https://github.com/Freescale/gstreamer-imx

TI OMAP processors have support: http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/GStreamer , also see TI Distributed Codec Engine .

Broadcom processors have support: https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/gstreamer0.10-crystalhd

There are also several standard interfaces to video accelerator hardware, including VDPAU , VAAPI , and OpenMax IL . If your processor is not one of the above, someone may have written a driver that maps one of these standard interfaces to your hardware.

The Rasberry Pi is apparently supported by the OpenMax IL plugin: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/releases/gst-omx/1.0.0.html

If you don't know whether your processor is supported, I'd search for the name and various combinations of "VDPAU", "VAAPI", etc.

Answer 2

There are a wide variety of encoding options in Gstreamer to take a raw stream and encode it. Pretty much any element ending in "enc" can be used to do the encoding. Here is a good example of a few encoding pipelines:

https://developer.ridgerun.com/wiki/index.php/TVP5146_GStreamer_example_pipelines

With that said, I'd caution that video encoding is extremely hardware intensive. I would also look at getting a special purpose hardware encoder and to not do software encoding via GStreamer if you're stream is a robust size.