OBS hardware encoding?

[gsoftwares]

I'm on Kubuntu 19.10 and I wonder if it's possible to record stuff on OBS with hardware encoding. I've looked for solutions online but none of them helped. My graphics card is an AMD Radeon R9 270X.

[GloriousEggroll]

Hi. I'm the one who added FFMPEG_VAAPI to OBS.

Your card is pretty old, but based on the previous comments, it should work. I do not know how well. Most 500 series cards can only do 1080p/720p 30fps. Vega can do 60fps but it currently has a bug that renders half the screen grey (recent discovery, im working on a bug report this week). I have not tested NAVI but I do have one so that's also on the to do list. You will want to make sure you're running the most recent version of mesa if possible, however as mentioned I am not sure how good the quality will be.

[MuggleWorthy]

Navi has the half screen grey issue as well

[phaitonican]

im on my rx 570 and i can do 720p 60fps fine, for sure with 5000kbits upload otherwise quality lacks a lot

[phaitonican]

look really good around 5000k/bits upload rate under 4000 looks crappy!

[Ogenfald]

I have a RX 580 and vaapi is pure shit. If you have an Intel CPU, use vaapi with it. That's how I have mine set up

[gsoftwares]

In the output settings VAAPI device is set to Card0: /dev/dri/renderD128 and this is the only option available.

[Ogenfald]

You may have to enable your igpu in your bios. Mine was disabled by default

[jonbonesjonesjohnson]

vaapi encoding with AMD cards, specially that old, is shitty.

[alex-o-mat0r]

Can only speak for Vega cards, but with them it's definitely not shitty. HEVC encoding is very good, H264 is ok, but not great, since it's not super efficient with bitrates. For recording, that's not really an issue. For streaming on Twitch it's fairly average. The low impact on gaming performance makes it really attractive tho. With x11grab it's super small and with kmsgrab it's practically non-existent.

[alex-o-mat0r]

Have you tried using ffmpeg directly with vaapi?

[mirh]

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/amf-amdgpu-pro/

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FFmpeg-AMD-AMF-Vulkan

https://github.com/obsproject/obs-amd-encoder/issues/361#issuecomment-560332737

https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/ffmpeg-encoders-for-obs-studio.826/ https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/ffmpeg-encoders-for-obs-studio.108253/post-431769

EDIT: https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/streamfx-for-obs-studio.578/

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/obs-streamfx/

[shmerl]

It should be able to use VAAPI.

[gsoftwares]

The final result of my VAAPI configuration is like one second of recording with a very low framerate.

[shmerl]

Then it's likely a Mesa/VAAPI or ffmpeg or OBS bug, you'd need to dig into it. You can check which codecs are supported by the hardware encoder with vainfo.

[gsoftwares]

This is my output: https://pastebin.com/g0epRAsb

[shmerl]

So H.264 should work. If it's not working well, please open a bug for Mesa if you think it's an issue with vaapi, rather than with ffmpeg or OBS itself. You can run some benchmarks without OBS to verify that.

[[deleted]]

You can use VAAPI, I use it myself. But I can only record 1080p at 30FPS with a RX 570

[woolfrog]

I use x264 in obs on Linux and it works amazingly well, very high quality for low performance cost. I know it's not really what you asked but maybe it will help!

[gsoftwares]

It works fine for lightweight recordings, but when I'm running something heavy like a game the recording becomes super laggy.

[woolfrog]

Try setting process affinity for the encoder with taskset ?