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Raspberry Pi 5 has no hardware video encoding and only HEVC decoding
- theragra 3y agoWhat about software encode, is it real time?
- traverseda 3y agoIt's really not a long post, if you wanted to read it.
- tecleandor 3y agoThey say it can encode 1080p60 (for the context, I guess it's real time) using just one processor (again, I'm guessing he means "one core"), and with a better quality than the RPi4 hardware encoder. They think it could be possible to encode 4K at 24fps with some work, but they're not right now going for that optimizations.
- megous 3y agoDepends on the encoder settings. With high enough settings, it will not be able to cope. So you're always trading compression ratio for speed.
- giantrobot 3y agoThe title doesn't seem to match the content. The comments are talking about hardware accelerated encode but I didn't see anything about accelerated decode being dropped.
- devl547 3y agoOfficial specs only state 4Kp60 HEVC decoder So no encoders and no h.264 decoder.
- orra 3y agoInteresting. Thankfully, LibreElec think the Raspberry Pi 5 is strictly better, despite shifting to software decoding: > BCM2712 supports HEVC 4K60 hardware decoding. It no longer supports H264 in hardware. This might sound odd but it removes the RPi4’s 1080p restriction on H264 decoding and the 4K H264 test media we have has played. The big increase in performance from the Quad-Core A76 chip means RPi5 can software decode AV1, H264, VC1, VP9, and more at 1080p with ease https://libreelec.tv/2023/09/28/rpi5-support/ https://libreelec.tv/2023/09/28/rpi5-support/
- MikusR 3y agohttps://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2138929#p2138929 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2138929#p2138... "JPEG and H264 encode and decode is now in software"
- michaelt 3y ago> "Actually only 4kp60 H265 (HEVC) decode is available > But it only uses 50% of the processors to do 1080p60 on YouTube" https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/#comment-1594037 https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/...
- InsomniacL 3y agoThe information is spread over multiple comments, I could only link to one comment and thought just linking to the main article would be confusing as the article itself doesn't mention it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lxgr 3y agoThat’s somewhat understandable, but still a bit disappointing. Not all playback devices support HEVC, and additionally HEVC will likely remain patent-encumbered much longer than e.g. H.264. I really wish there was at least one other and open hardware-accelerated format. It’s probably a bit too early for AV1, but VP9 would work with modern iOS and Android devices, for example. I also wonder how much licensing costs were a concern here, although past RPis had software-unlockable codecs for that exact reason.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoThey say elsewhere that the quality and usability of them did not meet what they considered reasonable for the mm^2 of die space required.
- lxgr 3y agoAh, yes, I do agree on the quality – it certainly can't compete in any way with high-quality software or dedicated encoders. But arguably it doesn't have to; many real-time applications (e.g. surveillance cameras) have local bandwidth to spare and/or don't care too highly about quality, and compatibility with older viewing devices without re-encoding is a priority.
- franga2000 3y agoIf compatibility is a priority and bandwidth isn't an issue, MJPEG is still the way to go and is by far the most common encoding I see in security cameras.
- _flux 3y agoOn the other hand you could get cool stuff from the video encoding hardware, such as access to motion vectors on the cheap: https://github.com/osmaa/pinymotion https://github.com/osmaa/pinymotion I wonder though if the OpenGL ES3.1 compute could be used for this purpose on it.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoI initially posted that the title did not match the content. The title is true but here’s another link to read: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/#comment-1594037 https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/...
- eurekin 3y agoAre there any external hardware encoders/decoders?
- ehutch79 3y agoFrom what I can tell, they mostly live in video cards at this point. There used to be an elgator capture card with some encoding, i _think_/
- ohthatsnotright 3y agoEl Gato has one, it's really nice: https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/game-capture-4k60-pro https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/game-capture-4k60-pro
- harlanji 3y agoI got a metal box with HDMI and an ethernet ports which encodes the HDMI video + audio and serves/publishes H.264 RTMP/TS segments. My intended use case was actually working with Pi's on live streams, installing fresh systems and the like where encoding might not be available anyway. I couldn't find the one online but it looks like there are a few out there. Side note/tangent, the Pi3 was powerful enough to transcode 720p down to lower resolutions in real time.
- lxgr 3y agoThe quite popular Logitech C920 webcam used to natively support H.264, but they dropped it in a model revision a while ago, because "nearly every computer offered in the market features a chipset that can efficiently encode high definition video at 1080p" [1]. I've used that very camera (without the accelerator) on an RPi 4 myself, and the only way to get acceptable quality was by using the Pi's H.264 hardware encoder. [1] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/video-collaboration/resources/think-tank/articles/article-logitech-and-h264-encoding.html https://www.logitech.com/en-us/video-collaboration/resources...
- londons_explore 3y agoOr... Does the SoC have support for such things, but there is no software API yet, either because nobody has had time to write it, or someone chose not to pay for the licenses?
- olabyne 3y agothey are talking about "ditching a few mm², so I guess it is a lack of hardware
- InsomniacL 3y agoFrom the linked comment, it appears it's not on the chip. > "In future we’ll have to do something, but for Pi 5 we feel the hardware encode is a mm^2 too far." My interpretation of this is they felt the benefit did not outweigh the cons of the die space.
- trebligdivad 3y agoI wonder how much the GPU and AI blocks can be used to acclerate encoding; I'd assume quite a bit.
- barbegal 3y agoHardly at all, video decoding isn't parallelisable. It's often lumped in with the GPU but it is significantly different.
- ajb 3y agoThe question is about encoding. It is significantly parallelizable because you are doing a search for the best encoding you can find. Also at a micro level there are things like motion search for which vector ops are useful. So I would say that it's likely they will look into that.
- bhouston 3y agoIs the direct competition, like the Orange Pi 5 based on the Rockchip RK3588S, differ at all in this regards? I think that lack of choice in HW accelerated video encoding/decoding may just be standard on low-end devices in part to reduce costs.
- danogentili 3y agoThe rk3588 and rk3588s both support hardware H264/HEVC encoding @ 8k30fps, as well as hardware HEVC/VP9 decoding @ 8k60fps, H264 decoding @ 8k30fps, AV1 decoding @ 4k60fps.
- MikusR 3y agoThe other even cheaper boards even had AES acceleration for years
- synergy20 3y agoJetson Orin Nano, the new devkit from Nvidia, surprisingly does not have a hardware video encoder either, you'll need use CPU to encode video instead, which is extremely odd considering video-encoding is a common use case on lots of video applications.
- Y_Y 3y agoWow, I was shocked to see that. They don't even bother using CUDA cores to encode (less of an issue if you have unified memory like in Jetsons). Anyway it seems you can get four 1080p streams at 30fps encoded to h264 in CPU if you set it up right: https://www.ridgerun.com/post/jetson-orin-nano-how-to-achieve-real-time-performance-for-video-encoding https://www.ridgerun.com/post/jetson-orin-nano-how-to-achiev...
- synergy20 3y agoyes but typically cpu is bad for video encoding, at least the power consumption will be much worse than hw encoder.
- Shorel 3y agoSo no more Nvidia NVENC? What will OBS do then? https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/broadcasting-guide/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/broadcasting-gui...
- paulmd 3y agoOnly removed from the tegras, not the gaming cards. But yeah if you were doing OBS streaming on your jetson, then the newer hardware won't have NVENC. Normally I'd say "but nobody is doing that" but someone (was) indeed doing exactly that, lol. https://blog.fosketts.net/2020/09/10/introducing-rabbit-i-bought-a-cloud/ https://blog.fosketts.net/2020/09/10/introducing-rabbit-i-bo... As mentioned it's probably a ton more relevant to embedded and robotics/computer-vision use-cases, which NVIDIA is really trying to push for (automotive etc). So it's still a surprising change and will be a pain for some people.
- 3y ago
- Thaxll 3y agoIt's kind of crazy to not have h264 decoded by hardware in 2023, even if it's low on CPU usage nowdays, it's still by far the most used codec.
- judge2020 3y agoh264 is the most available but probably not the most used. Every streaming service today either seeds AV1, VP9, or HEVC content first since it saves bandwidth[0] and every client from the past 5 years supports one of these newer formats (phones, GPUs, smart TVs, streaming boxes, etc). 0: https://www.etcentric.org/netflix-switching-from-vp9-codec-to-the-more-efficient-av1/ https://www.etcentric.org/netflix-switching-from-vp9-codec-t...
- baybal2 3y ago[dead]
- lxgr 3y agoH.264 is effectively the MP3 of video today: It provides neither the best quality, nor is it patent free (yet), but if an SoC supports any hardware accleration at all, H.264 is usually on the list. Applications/services that can afford the overhead of multiple format encoding will do so, but it's not always an option.
- Avamander 3y agoMost devices can indeed most likely handle software decode of more common resolutions, codecs and bitrates. But I'd really hope they'd pick the one that won't suck up all the battery, so H264. This line of thought is supported by the fact that YouTube still provides an H264 option with most if not all videos. With higher bitrate things, HEVC seems to grow in popularity but even software decode support is not everywhere. Netflix for example requires the installation of HEVC support on Windows to play 4K content. Actually hardware-accelerated video decode is even spottier and more unreliable across most platforms. The JS API for codec support (canPlayType) literally returns "maybe" and "probably". It's quite bad. So far the best compatibility I've seen has been Edge with flags on Windows (MPEG-2, H264, HEVC, AV1, VP8, VP9 with most also supporting accelerated encode). It still fails with some content (Dolby Vision P5 colors are incorrect, HEVC Rext doesn't play - more info about HEVC is available here https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-decoding https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...). Chrome on macOS is a close second in terms of codec support. The worst in terms of HW acceleration being all the browsers on desktop Linux-s, few and fragile combinations that offer limited and janky support. But it's slowly improving. This combined with the not-the-latest hardware many use, means things like VP9 or AV1 tend to stutter. I'd love to see some more generic stats, but considering the APIs aren't sufficient to determine actual support, these might be difficult to gather. But all things considered, I heavily doubt dropping H264 HW decode support was a good idea considering how often its still used.
- RetroTechie 3y agoGordon Hollingworth: "In future we’ll have to do something, but for Pi 5 we feel the hardware encode is a mm^2 too far." Sounds reasonable, given a fast cpu & less-than optimal hw-accelerated encoding options. As for that "something", maybe: 1) Drop hw-accelerated encoding and decoding entirely, and use the freed up silicon for much beefier cpus (like ones including -bigger- vector units, more cores etc. Cortex X?). That would be useful for any cpu heavy applications. 2) Include hw encoder for a common (1), relatively 'heavy' codec. And hw decoder for same + maybe others. 3) Only include decoder(s?), like they seem to have done for RPi5. 4) Include some kind of flexible compute fabric that can be configured to do the heavy lifting for popular video codecs. Combined with: 5) Move to newer silicon node to obtain higher efficiency or transistor budget. Whatever route a future RPi would go, imho hw-accelerated decoding is much more useful than encoding.
- ksec 3y agoHW-Decoding uses less mm2 than encoding, provides biggest power saving and benefits to user, all while being cheaper on patents.
- sleepybrett 3y ago... only if the user is decoding video.
- belthesar 3y agoIt's fair to say that not all Pi users are decoding video, but with the number of projects doing some sort of video-related workloads, with Pi's processing camera footage and doing CV work and people using Pi's as low power workstations as just two examples, it's reasonable that folks that had historically used Raspberry Pi compute units for video are disappointed to hear that they're now pushing a lot of CPU power to perform video decode and encode.
- smarx007 3y agoWhich is... everyone who has ever opened a YouTube link? Though might make sense to not include it in the Zero series.
- swayvil 3y agoWill it do as a desktop system? What do you think?
- lannisterstark 3y agoWhy not just get an HP Prodesk or dell optiplex or hp elite desk or whatever Lenovo? 6th/7th gen Intel CPU models are all cheaper than this.
- aag01 3y ago"In future we’ll have to do something, but for Pi 5 we feel the hardware encode is a mm^2 too far." is corporate speech for "broadcom decided not to let us use their video IP cores for low cost/no cost any longer"
- jandrese 3y agoIt is a bit frustrating how married the Raspberry Pi foundation is to a company that couldn't care less if they live or die. Broadcom has always been at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the open source community.
- cogman10 3y agoThere's not really an alternative. Broadcom is one of the few options out there for ARM SoC. Rpi could dump a bunch of money into making their own SoC, but that would really ballon the costs.
- firebat45 3y agoI really wish they would stop making newer, faster, more expensive Pi's and just focus on making the existing Pi's cheaper and more available. Out of the dozen or so RPi's I have, not a single one is even connected to a monitor. I don't need dual 4k HDMI ports. I'd love a widely available and in-stock $20 Pi. It's like they've forgotten what the RPi is all about.
- starik36 3y agoThat's what the RPi Zero 2 is all about. They are $15 and work great.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoCan’t speak for GP but I want a $20 device with a wired Ethernet port. I’m using pis where they need to reliably communicate in real time.
- carlos_rpn 3y agoCheck the Banana Pis if you haven't already. Most of them have it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Pi
- Blackthorn 3y agoThis is accidentally a fantastic example of the issues with the original commenter's train of thought. Not everyone needs every single feature, but every single feature is needed individually by someone.
- paulmd 3y agoyeah, with how many "maker" things have emerged around RPi, it's a bit of a dickpunch to be removing features that a nontrivial portion of the user base are building projects/products around. Hopefully we have gotten past the "RPi is for education, not makers!" thing, there is really zero traction on big computer labs full of raspberry pis. even insofar as it's used in education it's still used for maker tasks, people building robots with computer vision or whatever, and some of those use-cases need the encoder too. RPi has always been a somewhat incoherent product that survived because it was a below-average solution to any problem, the jack-of-all-trades for $45 (plus another $100 of accessories). If it doesn't have video encode, why would I want this for plex instead of a NUC clone? why would I buy this instead of a big AVR32/STM32 microcontroller for building a robot? Why would I want this instead of a Bus Pirate for GPIO? Why would I want to use this as a mini-desktop if I can't even do a Teams call on it? Etc etc. It's barely an adequate product even with all the legacy feature set there, if you start pulling pieces off then competing products become even more compelling for many use-cases. Reality is they will probably be fine because of the name recognition and brand but it's not good management either. I'd love to see real numbers but just like with the RX 6500XT I just can't imagine the encoder is that big. We are talking about pennies more per die, and likely this will cost them more in total sales than the pennies represent in the total product cost - you are saving 0.1% of the MSRP and losing 5-10% of potential addressable market. Literally would just be better for them to eat the cost, almost certainly. And you are correct that while nobody uses all the features, everybody uses some of them. I frankly do not understand the decision to depart from mainstream SOC configurations here - which obviously would have an encoder.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoCan someone explain the hubbub here? My read of the specs seems to match the specs of the Pi 4, HEVC decoding but no encoding.
- InsomniacL 3y agoRPI3 / RPI4 have hardware accelerated encoding/decoding for H.264, this has not been included for RPI5.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoThanks. I suppose that will prolong the shelf life of the 4.
- lannisterstark 3y agoRemember you can get an HP Prodesk G3 400 or some such for $60 refurbed with far more hardware capabilities if you don't need the portable form factor, gpio, or power consumption. It's actually a better deal for home servers.
- jrockway 3y agoElectricity is something you have to pay for for always-on computers: Prodesk G3: 24 hours * 365 days * 35W * 1000W/kW * $0.30/kWh = $91 Raspberry Pi 5: 24 hours * 365 days * 12W * 1000W/kW * $0.30/kWh = $31 It's likely that 12W over-counts for the Raspberry Pi 5 and 35W under-counts for the Intel chip, so it might be even worse than this.
- lannisterstark 3y agoRight, I agree, but electricity prices are variable and location dependent, for example, it doesn't cost me 30c/kwh, it's more like 5 cents and 3 cents depending on the time. With that logic, the $20 in difference of $30 per year vs $10 per year of Pi is fairly meaningless for performance boost I am getting. If your electricity is expensive, sure, but I imagine the performance boost would be worth it for an actual homeserver that a G3 can make vs a tinkering/fun project you can make with a Pi.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoWhat do they idle at? I have two home servers that are essentially at idle 24/7.
- hollerith 3y agoYou're comparing a CPU that became generally available in 2017 or earlier (i.e., the 7th-gen or 6th-gen Core CPU in the Prodesk G3) with a more much recent CPU.
- jrockway 3y agoI didn't invite the comparison. The comment I was replying to said to buy this exact model of computer instead of a Raspberry Pi 5.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoWow, I'm surprised this took this long to come out! The raspicam/raspivid ecosystem is huge and without hardware h264 encoding it is absolutely dead in the water. This makes the rPi5 a neutered bit of hardware and the rPi4 (and even the rPi3) better options for quite a number of applications!
- tjoff 3y agoI'm not sure how you could get to that conclusion from the link? >[...] but actually it only takes around 1 processor to encode 1080p60 with our default settings (which is still better quality than the PI 4 hardware encoder) Power consumption is worse, yes, but that is not a huge issue for the raspicam/raspivid ecosystem you are talking about. If anything the price is a huge issue, so just buy the pi4 if the hardware suffices or the 5 if you need something better.
- andrewstuart 3y agoIf you want hardware video encoding check out this SBC running a latest gen AMD 7840, all the encoding inc h264, av1, hevc plus latest gen AMD GPU: https://youtu.be/WCRK-Uwb0EA?si=BlxaYkg7Ecq2rALJ https://youtu.be/WCRK-Uwb0EA?si=BlxaYkg7Ecq2rALJ
- snvzz 3y agoBuy Raspberry Pi 5 if, and only if, you want to support MPEG and their proprietary codecs through royalty fees.
- suprjami 3y agoNo h264? Useless to me. I'll stick with my Pi 4, and will replace them with a NUC or Ryzen mini PC when the time comes.
- rightisleft 3y agoThere are a ton of pi derivatives that offer a pretty broad range of configurations. I always think of the Pi as the general consumer flagship. I was still pretty impressed with the Pi 4B... I just wish it had broader availability. Just a handful of examples: Banana PI M5: https://www.banana-pi.org/ https://www.banana-pi.org/ Odroid C4: https://wiki.odroid.com/start https://wiki.odroid.com/start Odroid N2+: Odroid C4: https://wiki.odroid.com/start https://wiki.odroid.com/start Libre "Le Potato": https://libre.computer/ https://libre.computer/ Libre "Renegade": https://libre.computer/ https://libre.computer/ Orange Pi 3 LTS: http://www.orangepi.org/ http://www.orangepi.org/ Orange Pi 5: http://www.orangepi.org/ http://www.orangepi.org/ Rock Pi 4C+: https://rockpi.org/ https://rockpi.org/ Nano Pi M4B: http://nanopi.io/ http://nanopi.io/
- hatthew 3y agoYeah, there's a huge variety of SBCs that exist, most of which have a better specs/price ratio than RPi. If you buy a RPi, you're spending money on the hardware, you're spending it on the mountains of support/tutorials/standardization. I suspect that most people on HN can handle the reduced knowledge base that exists for BPi, OPi, ROCK, etc.
- wkat4242 3y agoI think it's a really weak excuse of Gordon Hollingworth "On the processor you have more control over the output". The one on the pi 1-4 worked totally fine and nobody complained about its quality. Don't forget you can always do software if you want to, it was just really great to have the hardware option.
- cosmojg 3y agoFor $85, the Orange Pi 5 supports 8K hardware video encoding (H265/H264) via gstreamer, and that's just what I'm aware of. I'm sure there are other single-board computers with similar (or better) features. Unless you're dependent on the Raspberry Pi HAT ecosystem or you're not particularly technical, it's worth considering the alternatives.
- mastax 3y agoRaspberryPi's documentation about the CPU has this to say: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/processors.html#bcm2712 https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/processo... - 4Kp60 HEVC hardware decode - Other CODECs run in software - H264 1080p24 decode ~10–20% of CPU - H264 1080p60 decode ~50–60% of CPU - H264 1080p30 encode (from ISP) ~30–40% CPU Doesn't seem like the end of the world to me but I'm not trying to use the thing as a media server.
- t0bia_s 3y ago4K in 24 FPS is enough for me for media stream server. Films are in 23.97 FPS so no reason to have higher FPS if you dont want smooth UI experience.
- aaron695 3y agoH264 needs to be burned in a fire. I hate to use the zealots logic but H264 outputs more CO2. For the normies, H264 wastes time and money. The sooner the warez crews move to 'H265 first' the better. And lets not forget the Raspberry Pi 5 is a status symbol for IT managers to give to their daughters. Real hackers are using the Chinese eco system.
- snvzz 3y ago>The sooner the warez crews move to 'H265 first' the better. Sure you don't mean the royalty-free, higher quality Aomedia AV1? As I don't think adopting yet another encumbered MPEG codec is going to help anyone but MPEG.
- nyanmisaka 3y agoMaybe my expectations for RPi 5 are too high, but it’s hard to imagine that an SBC manufacturer known as the industry standard removed the H.264 decoder & encoder from their latest product instead of adding VP9 and AV1, causing users to go crazy when YouTube playback dropped frames. Not to mention serving up transcoded content as a media server. Good news is that I've been playing around with its competing products. For those users who want a normal media server experience in 2023, Jellyfin will support RK3588 full hardware accelerated transcoding, includes AV1 decode, subtitle burn-in and HDR tone-mapping. (WIP https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-ffmpeg/issues/34#issuecomment-1784116089 https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-ffmpeg/issues/34#issuec...)