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FFmpeg with GPU encoder support

orange is built against FFmpeg 4.4 with NVIDIA NVENC support. Install the NVIDIA driver and CUDA toolkit before starting (see CUDA & Emergent SDK).

Prerequisites

  1. To compile FFmpeg with NVIDIA, you need ffnvcodec. Clone the headers repo:

    mkdir ~/nvidia/ && cd ~/nvidia/
git clone https://git.videolan.org/git/ffmpeg/nv-codec-headers.git

  2. Install ffnvcodec:

    cd nv-codec-headers && sudo make install

  3. Get FFmpeg source:

    cd ~/nvidia/
git clone https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git ffmpeg/

  4. Install build tools:

    sudo apt install build-essential yasm cmake libtool libc6 libc6-dev unzip wget libnuma1 libnuma-dev

    You may also need:

    sudo apt-get install git make nasm pkg-config libx264-dev libxext-dev libxfixes-dev zlib1g-dev

Check out FFmpeg 4.4

This is the version orange builds against:

cd ~/nvidia/ffmpeg
git checkout release/4.4
mkdir build

If you have trouble compiling, the GPU architecture in --nvccflags may be too low — check config.log.

Configure & build

The --nvccflags option pins the CUDA architecture. Pick the one matching your GPU:

For Turing (compute capability 7.5):

./configure --prefix=$(pwd)/build \
    --disable-static --enable-shared --enable-nonfree \
    --enable-cuda-nvcc --enable-libnpp \
    --extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/cuda/include \
    --extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/cuda/lib64 \
    --nvccflags="-gencode arch=compute_75,code=sm_75 -O2"

For Hopper (compute capability 9.0):

./configure --prefix=$(pwd)/build \
    --disable-static --enable-shared --enable-nonfree \
    --enable-cuda-nvcc --enable-libnpp \
    --extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/cuda/include \
    --extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/cuda/lib64 \
    --nvccflags="-gencode arch=compute_90,code=sm_90 -O2"

(Substitute your own arch as needed.)

Compile:

make -j $(nproc)

Verify the executable:

ls -l ffmpeg
./ffmpeg

Install:

make install

Add to PATH

If you followed the steps above, FFmpeg lives at $HOME/nvidia/ffmpeg/build. Add it to .bashrc:

export PATH=/usr/local/cuda/bin:/home/$USER/nvidia/ffmpeg/build/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/cuda/lib64:/home/$USER/nvidia/ffmpeg/build/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

orange's CMakeLists.txt assumes $HOME/nvidia/ffmpeg. If you installed elsewhere, edit DIR_FFMPEG in CMakeLists.txt.