Solved How can I record webcam feed using FFMPEG with H.265 encoding using AMD AMF GPU hardware acceleration?

First_Law_of_Unix

First_Law_of_Unix

Hello, I am trying to record my live webcam video using FFMPEG to encode and record it in H.265 using Radeon RX 580 GPU.

Are there any AMD AMF drivers which works for FreeBSD?

Have no idea how to get this to work.

Also how can I watch the live video stream from my USB 3.0 webcam?

Thanks for any advice.
 
Phishfry said:
webcamd(8) is the driver end.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply.

I'm technically not using a real webcam but rather a "HDMI to USB 3.0 capture card" that I got from Amazon:
Capture Card, Video Capture Card 4K 1080P 60FPS, HDMI Capture Card Switch, Game Capture Card USB 3.0 for Live Streaming Video Recording, Screen Capture Device Work with PS4/PC/OBS/DSLR/Camera

I'll see if webcamd works. I know the capture card works on OBS on Ubuntu without installing any drivers.

Thanks.
 
Well I am surprised. I was able to get full hardware accelerated transcoding for HEVC/(H.265) and H.264 working on FreeBSD 13.1 using MESA drivers and VA-API for AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU. (Although, I'm not using AMD's proprietary AMF encoder since I haven't tested it yet, the VA-API works better in my experience and have HEVC capabilities for older AMD GPUs)

I used FFMPEG from FreeBSD's ports and compiled it to do the transcoding.
Need to make sure that amdgpu drivers are installed properly and working.

I haven't seen any tutorials or implementation or explanation on the on the web to do this, so I'll leave a quick brief details on how I got it to work:

Would also like to mention the following pkgs below needs to be installed to get it to work (some might not needed):

Install vainfo:
pkg install libva-utils

Install Mesa Gallium "VAAPI" drivers, which is a Gallium driver for video decoding on AMD hardware:
pkg install mesa-gallium-va

Install Mesa Gallium "VDPAU" drivers, which is a Gallium driver for video decoding on AMD hardware
pkg install mesa-gallium-vdpau

Install OpenGL hardware acceleration drivers for DRI2+:
pkg install mesa-dri

Install Off-Screen Mesa implementation of the OpenGL API:
pkg install libosmesa

Install OpenGL libraries that support GLX and EGL clients:
pkg install mesa-libs

I did a reboot and then ran the following FFMPEG command for testing:
Capture USB stream from a V4L2 camera device (e.g. a UVC webcam), decode it and encode it as HEVC:

ffmpeg -f v4l2 -video_size 1920x1080 \
-hwaccel vaapi \
-hwaccel_device /dev/dri/renderD128 \
-hwaccel_output_format vaapi \
-i /dev/video0 -vf 'scale_vaapi=format=nv12' \
-c:v hevc_vaapi output.mp4 -y

The command worked and produced the video file and plays correctly.
This is great, I can now use FreeBSD 100% to implement a DVR/NVR system without needing to use Linux.
If this works for FFMPEG, then this means HEVC GPU transcoding should also work for OBS and many applications that uses VA-API.
 
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