Table of Contents

1. 什么是 gstreamer-vaapi

VA-API support to GStreamer
* vaapi<_CODEC_>dec is used to decode JPEG, MPEG-2, MPEG-4:2, H.264, AVC, H.264 MVC, VP8, VP9, VC-1, WMV3, HEVC videos to VA surfaces,
depending on the actual value of <CODEC> and the underlying hardware capabilities. This plugin is also able to implicitly download the decoded surface to raw YUV buffers.

vaapi<_CODEC_>enc is used to encode into MPEG-2, H.264 AVC, H.264, MVC, JPEG, VP8, VP9, HEVC videos, depending on the actual value of <CODEC> (mpeg2, h264, etc.) and the hardware capabilities. Bydefault, raw format bitstreams are generated, so the result may be piped to a muxer, e.g. qtmux for MP4 containers.
vaapipostproc is used to filter VA surfaces, for e.g. scaling, deinterlacing (bob, motion-adaptive, motion-compensated), noise reduction or sharpening. This plugin is also used to upload raw YUV pixels into VA surfaces.
vaapisink is used to render VA surfaces to an X11 or Wayland display. This plugin also features a "headless" mode (DRM) more suited to remote transcode scenarios, with faster throughput.
vaapioverlay is a accelerated compositor that blends or composite different video streams.

2. Features

VA-API support from 0.39
JPEG, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 AVC, H.264 MVC, VP8, VC-1, HEVC and VP9 ad-hoc decoders
MPEG-2, H.264 AVC,H.264 MVC, JPEG, VP8, VP9 and HEVC ad-hoc encoders
OpenGL rendering through VA/GLX or GLX texture-from-pixmap + FBO
Support for EGL backend
Support for the Wayland display server
Support for headless decode pipelines with VA/DRM
Support for major HW video decoding solutions on Linux (AMD,Intel, NVIDIA)
Support for HW video encoding on Intel HD Graphics hardware
Support for VA Video Processing APIs (VA/VPP)
- Scaling and color conversion
- Image enhancement filters: Sharpening, Noise Reductio, Color Balance, Skin-Tone-Enhancement
- Advanced deinterlacing: Motion-Adaptive, Motion-Compensated

3. Requirements

3.1. Hardware requirements

Hardware supported by i965 driver or iHD, such as
- Intel Ironlake, Sandybridge, Ivybridge, Haswell, Broadwell,
  Skylake, etc. (HD Graphics)
- Intel BayTrail, Braswell
- Intel Poulsbo (US15W)
- Intel Medfield or Cedar Trail
Hardware supported by AMD Radeonsi driver, such as the list below
- AMD Carrizo, Bristol Ridge, Raven Ridge, Picasso, Renoir
- AMD Tonga, Fiji, Polaris XX, Vega XX, Navi 1X
Other hardware supported by Mesa VA gallium state-tracker

4. Usage

VA elements are automatically plugged into GStreamer pipelines. So using playbin should work as is.

However, here are a few alternate pipelines that could be manually constructed.

Play an H.264 video with an MP4 container in fullscreen mode

  $ gst-launch-1.0 -v filesrc location=/path/to/video.mp4 ! \
      qtdemux ! vaapidecodebin ! vaapisink fullscreen=true

Play a raw MPEG-2 interlaced stream

  $ gst-launch-1.0 -v filesrc location=/path/to/mpeg2.bits ! \
      mpegvideoparse ! vaapimpeg2dec ! vaapipostproc ! vaapisink

Convert from one pixel format to another, while also downscaling

$ gst-launch-1.0 -v filesrc location=/path/to/raw_video.yuv ! \
    videoparse format=yuy2 width=1280 height=720 ! \
    vaapipostproc format=nv12 height=480 ! vaapisink

Encode a 1080p stream in raw I420 format into H.264

$ gst-launch-1.0 -v filesrc location=/path/to/raw_video.yuv ! \
    videoparse format=i420 width=1920 height=1080 framerate=30/1 ! \
    vaapih264enc rate-control=cbr tune=high-compression ! \
    qtmux ! filesink location=/path/to/encoded_video.mp4