Hardware accelerate transcoder with CUDA

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi the documentation seems to suggest CUDA is not supported anymore , why is that ? Im investigating hardware acceleration options.

I don’t believe our servers support the Intel QuickSync option. Is that an integrated graphics solution ?

Also what is the correct solution for MBR transcoding to edge servers. I have configured the transcoder to become active on a particular live stream name. This produces multiple outputs like liveevent_1080. Then I have a custom medialist module on the edge servers which contain these filenames.

Will the keyframe interval match and be in sync if I keep it the source ? Should I be changing these to 3 x framerate = 75 or 90 ?

2

Hi Daniel,

Regarding your first question about hardware acceleration with CUDA.

The two hardware encoding options that are available in Wowza Engine are QuickSync which is available on certain Intel CPUs, as well as NVENC, which is a feature on Nvidia GPUs.

CUDA is still used for decoding with Wowza Transcoder. You can change the decoder implementation on the Transcoder Template.

Regarding your second question, It is best to stick with the keyframe interval from the source. That being said you do want to make sure that the source is setup to provide a recommended interval of 2 seconds.

Regards,

Alex

3

OK so when publishing set to the interval to 2 to 3 seconds no problems.

As for CUDA. So if a specific supported Nvidia card is installed I set decoding to NVENC. But encoding it has to be QuickSync rather than software which requires specific XEON cpus ? So NVENC can’t be used for encoding ?

I have to specify new hardware it seems now to do this properly. I believe too many frames are dropping or something when trying software encoding.

4

The Wowza Transcoder supports both QuickSync and NVENC hardware acceleration option for encoding. If you have a GPU that supports NVENC you would enable this under the encoding not decoding.

The decoding can be configured to use CUDA though.

As far as QuickSync, it is available on a large variety of CPUs. Most GPUs that have the Intel Graphics available on them, will have QuickSync.

If you want us to check the issue you are having, please open a support ticket here. We can take a look at the logs and possibly spot where the issue is originating from.

Regards,

Alex

5

I just needed clarification before looking to source NVIDIA cards if the server even supports it.

I was confused about the documentation. I thought the NVidia cards were not supported at all. So if we get one of the suggested cards , NVENC can be used for encoding and NVCUVID can be used for decoding off the same card ?

See this. the specification writing is a bit confusing.

https://www.wowza.com/docs/server-specifications-for-nvidia-nvenc-and-nvidia-cuda-acceleration-with-wowza-transcoder

so it needs any one of these cards ?

  • NVIDIA Quadro K4000 and above - Desktop Workstation
  • NVIDIA Quadro K2000M and above - Mobile Workstation
  • NVIDIA Tesla K10 and above - High Performance Computing

I don’t know what is required then for Quicksync support. Is a graphics card and specific cpu still required ?

With the quicksync requirements. It seems to suggest it needs a cpu with integrated graphics ?

  • 2nd-generation Intel Core Processors with Intel HD Graphics 3000/2000 or later

  • 3rd-generation Intel Core Processors with Intel HD Graphics 2500/4000

  • 4th-generation Intel Core Processors with Intel HD Graphics 4400/4600

  • 5th-generation Intel Core Processors with Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200

  • 6th-generation Intel Core Processors with Intel HD Graphics 510/530 or Intel Iris Pro 580

  • 7th-generation Intel Core Processors with Intel HD Graphics 615/620

    We first need to figure out hardware specs. The software mode option isn’t so great.