GNOME Makes Progress On GPU-Accelerated Screencasting, systemd-homed Home Encryption

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Makes Progress On GPU-Accelerated Screencasting, systemd-homed Home Encryption

GNOME developers remain quite busy with various new initiatives thanks to their funding from their Sovereign Tech Fund. There's some screencasting enhancements still on deck for GNOME 46, various GNOME accessibility improvements forthcoming, and also ongoing work around systemd-homed home directory encryption support...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-46-Screencast-Pending

[and.elf]

Great to use hardware for screencast! I wonder if you can select which GPU to use, or just uses the "current" one, or an API priority. Let's say I have an AMD APU and an NVIDIA 3000-series discrete card (quite a normal setup for gaming laptops with Ryzen CPU). I guess the easiest way is to start the Nvidia card when you want to use nvenc..?

[Artim]

Great to use hardware for screencast! I wonder if you can select which GPU to use, or just uses the "current" one, or an API priority. Let's say I have an AMD APU and an NVIDIA 3000-series discrete card (quite a normal setup for gaming laptops with Ryzen CPU). I guess the easiest way is to start the Nvidia card when you want to use nvenc..?

Just read the comment of the merge request, it answers that question.

[and.elf]

Just read the comment of the merge request, it answers that question.

I see.. too bad..

[spicfoo]

I see.. too bad..

Too bad you didn't read the PR before asking the question or did you mean something else?

[treba]

Great to use hardware for screencast! I wonder if you can select which GPU to use, or just uses the "current" one, or an API priority. Let's say I have an AMD APU and an NVIDIA 3000-series discrete card (quite a normal setup for gaming laptops with Ryzen CPU). I guess the easiest way is to start the Nvidia card when you want to use nvenc..?

Note that the inbuild screencast is meant as a simle "it just works" solution. For complex setups or specific requirements one can always use OBS or something similar.

[Artim]

Note that the inbuild screencast is meant as a simle "it just works" solution. For complex setups or specific requirements one can always use OBS or something similar.

Well, that's the whole point of Gnome after all. Accept a bunch of settings in Tweaks and dconf there's not much you can change about Gnome. Things are supposed to just work without thinking a lot. Of course you could argue that some defaults may be questionable, but that's it.

[QwertyChouskie]

Great to use hardware for screencast! I wonder if you can select which GPU to use, or just uses the "current" one, or an API priority. Let's say I have an AMD APU and an NVIDIA 3000-series discrete card (quite a normal setup for gaming laptops with Ryzen CPU). I guess the easiest way is to start the Nvidia card when you want to use nvenc..?

Spinning up the dGPU just for video encoding would take way more power than just using CPU encoding. Defaulting to the iGPU makes way more sense here, the small quality boost of nvenc is not worth the massive power consumption increase.

[Artim]

Spinning up the dGPU just for video encoding would take way more power than just using CPU encoding. Defaulting to the iGPU makes way more sense here, the small quality boost of nvenc is not worth the massive power consumption increase.

To be fair, this might be a bad example, but he has a point. Intel's first dGPUs are mostly written as a kinda cheap way to enable AV1 streaming, as you don't need a new CPU and with it probably a new motherboard. So when Gnome will be switching to AV1 - as the comment in the PR suggests will eventually happen - this might be reason enough. And screencasting doesn't mean that you are recording your DE, so the dGPU might already be doing stuff. Of course for your day-to-day screen recording that may be overkill, as you can easily transcode to something more efficient, with and without hardware acceleration (looking at you SVT-AV1).

[tildearrow]

And to think that I had to write a hardware-accelerated screen recorder five years ago...

Spinning up the dGPU just for video encoding would take way more power than just using CPU encoding. Defaulting to the iGPU makes way more sense here, the small quality boost of nvenc is not worth the massive power consumption increase.

Intel's hardware encoder performs better in terms of quality when compared to NVIDIA.
In the case of AMD, it's another story. I wouldn't say it's just a "small quality boost". NVIDIA chips have 4:4:4 encoding and far superior CBR/VBR encoding quality, something AMD ones lack.

For one thing it is much better to encode using the same card/chip that does compositing as it eliminates one (potentially slow) memory transfer....