Vulkan Video 1.0 Extensions Published As Part Of Vulkan 1.3.238

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Vulkan Video 1.0 Extensions Published As Part Of Vulkan 1.3.238

In early 2021 the Vulkan Video extensions were published in beta/provisional form as a new industry-standard video encode/decode API with the context of Vulkan. As a nice Christmas gift this week from The Khronos Group, the extensions have been finalized as Vulkan Video 1.0 and are now deemed ready for production use...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-Video-1.0

[schmidtbag]

Kinda surprised it took so long for this to happen but oh well, better late than never I guess.

[Sethox]

Kinda surprised it took so long for this to happen but oh well, better late than never I guess.

As this release is quite late in the game, it does show it's possible. Now we need encouragement for others to create a Vulkan extension for the better AV1 encoder/decoder Video Acceleration.
I feel like this is the way for Valve to support that work (if the independent project is presented well and structured well), like many other independent contractors Valve has hired.

[Quackdoc]

I thought EXT were optional in vulkan spec and ones without are mandatory. I hope im mistaken so can someone clear this up? since this seems to imply that vulkan video is going to be a necessary feature for conformance down the line. which I could see possibly bunging up some devices.

** apiext:VK_KHR_video_decode_h264 (promoted from EXT)
** apiext:VK_KHR_video_decode_h265 (promoted from EXT)​

[avis]

Kinda surprised it took so long for this to happen but oh well, better late than never I guess.

Not surprised at all: the Vulkan specification is not a joke and they need a formal approval from all the GPU vendors (AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, ARM, MediaTek, Samsung, etc.) before adding new extensions to the spec. And of course conformance tests have to be written.

Sadly there still isn't any Vulkan Video extensions surrounding AV1 or VP9 video acceleration. We've been told before that they are working on further extending Vulkan Video but disappointingly even with all major GPU vendors now supporting AV1 decode/encode, the Vulkan extensions remain missing in action.

Not an issue at all, NVIDIA or someone will first implement it as vendor specific extensions, once all others have verified it works for them, the Khronos group will add them to the standard.

[Mitch]

Forgive my ignorance but does this mean less packages are needed to get Firefox and VLC to HW decode these kinds of videos? Will I just need Mesa, my gpu's firmware, and the latest kernel?

[avis]

Forgive my ignorance but does this mean less packages are needed to get Firefox and VLC to HW decode these kinds of videos? Will I just need Mesa, my gpu's firmware, and the latest kernel?

No, you still need ffmpeg or something.

The spec only talks about decoding raw video data, nothing about demuxing the source stream.

[luno]

As this release is quite late in the game, it does show it's possible. Now we need encouragement for others to create a Vulkan extension for the better AV1 encoder/decoder Video Acceleration.
I feel like this is the way for Valve to support that work (if the independent project is presented well and structured well), like many other independent contractors Valve has hired.

AV1 is expected in 2023 https://twitter.com/neilt3d/status/1604859421011517441

[abu_shawarib]

What's the point of this over existing APIs? The only thing I can think of is platform agnosticism.

[smitty3268]

What's the point of this over existing APIs? The only thing I can think of is platform agnosticism.

Platform and vendor. Right now you need to use different video APIs for different drivers, this is an attempt to create one that everyone will support. It's a little late for x264, but it's just a proof-of-concept for other upcoming codecs.