GSTH266Enc: A Gstreamer Plugin for VVC Encoder

An open-source GStreamer Plugin for VVC encoder (h266enc)

This plugin is still under development and will continue to improve by:

1. extending the API layer to support other known or future VVC encoder implementations
2. exposing additional encoder properties
3. extending support to other platforms (e.g. linux)
4. ...

Plugin Architecture

Following is a pictorial representation of the Gstreamer plugin architecture

Prerequisites

Prerequisites for building the Gstreamer plugin on Windows are:

• Visual Studio 19 (for MSVC compiler (version 19.29.30038.1))
• meson (version 0.59.0)
• Gstreamer (version 1.20.1)
• VVC encoder library

VVC encoder libraries currently supported by the plugin are:

• VVenC v1.4.0 - https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/vvenc
• UVG266 v0.4.1 - https://github.com/ultravideo/uvg266

Installation

MSVC compiler

The MSVC compiler is available as part of the visual studio for windows installation. A different C/C++ compiler for windows can be used but is not tested.

Meson

To install Meson, follow the instructions on https://mesonbuild.com/Getting-meson.html

Python 3.7 or up is required for meson.

GStreamer

1. Download the Runtime and Development installer. The installers are available under the following link. In this project we are using x64.

   • We are developing this project against Gstreamer 1.20.1. To download the installers for Gstreamer 1.20.1 show the link

   • More information on installation of Gstreamer on Windows is available on the official website

2. Run the installers. You will be prompted with details on where to install gstreamer, usually it is in C:\

   • running the devel package will prompt you with three options ie. Typical, Custom, Complete

   • choose the complete installation to install pkgconfig files

3. Setting the environment varibles: (assuming gstreamer is installed in C:)

   • Add C:\gstreamer\1.0\msvc_x86_64\bin to PATH

   • Set PKG_CONFIG_PATH to C:\gstreamer\1.0\msvc_x86_64\lib\pkgconfig

   • Set GSTREAMER_ROOT_X86_64 to C:\gstreamer\1.0\msvc_x86_64

4. Reboot your system

5. Open terminal and check gst-launch-1.0

VVC encoder library

VVenC

• Checkout the latest code from here.
• Follow the build process to generate the shared library (vvenc.dll)
• install the vvenc.dll to the GStreamer install directory under C:\gstreamer\1.0\msvc_x86_64\bin\

UVG266

• Checkout the latest code from here
• Follow the build process to generate the shared library (uvg266.dll)
• install the generated uvg266.dll to the Gstreamer install directory under C:\gstreamer\1.0\msvc_x86_64\bin\

Compiling the GSTH266enc plugin

Plugin is compiled using meson build system. The plugin is only tested on a 64-bit windows machine.

Run the following commands in the root directory to generate the plugin and API libraries

    mkdir builddir
    cd builddir
    meson ../. 
        -DENCODER_TYPE=<VVENC or UVG>
        -DENCODER_LIB_PATH=<path to encoder lib directory>
        -DENCODER_INCLUDE_PATH=<path to encoder include directory>
        
    meson compile -C .

For example, to configure the meson to compile the plugin with VVenC library:

meson ../. -DENCODER_TYPE=VVENC -DENCODER_LIB_PATH=<path to VVenC lib folder> -DENCODER_INCLUDE_PATH=<path to VVenC include folder>

Similarly, to configure the meson to compile the plugin with UVG266 library:

meson ../. -DENCODER_TYPE=UVG -DENCODER_LIB_PATH=<path to UVG266 lib folder> -DENCODER_INCLUDE_PATH=<path to UVG266 include folder>

After successful compilation, following shared libraries are generated that need to be copied to the Gstreamer installation directory:

• gsth266enc.dll (under builddir/plugin/ directory)
  • This is copied to the GStreamer-1.0 lib directory at C:\gstreamer\1.0\msvc_x86_64\lib\gstreamer-1.0\
• <encoder_type>_lib.dll depending on the encoder type (under builddir/encoders/<encoder_type>_utils/) where encoder_type={vvenc or uvg}
  • This is copied to the GStreamer-1.0 bin directory at C:\gstreamer\1.0\msvc_x86_64\bin\

In the next section, we demonstrate the usage of the plugin

Usage of the plugin

One can inspect the h266enc element using the gst-inspect-1.0 utility provided by Gstreamer as follows

    gst-inspect-1.0 h266enc

Following are the pad templates supported by the plugin:

Pad Templates:
  SINK template: 'sink'
    Availability: Always
    Capabilities:
      video/x-raw
              framerate: [ 0/1, 2147483647/1 ]
                  width: [ 1, 2147483647 ]
                 height: [ 1, 2147483647 ]
                 format: { (string)I420, (string)I420_10LE }

  SRC template: 'src'
    Availability: Always
    Capabilities:
      video/x-h266
              framerate: [ 0/1, 2147483647/1 ]
                  width: [ 16, 2147483647 ]
                 height: [ 16, 2147483647 ]
          stream-format: byte-stream
              alignment: au
                profile: { (string)main-10 }

Following are the supported element properties:

    Element Properties:
        bitrate             : Bitrate in kbit/sec
                                flags: readable, writable, changeable in NULL, READY, PAUSED or PLAYING state
                                Unsigned Integer. Range: 1 - 102400000 Default: 10000000
        min-force-key-unit-interval: Minimum interval between force-keyunit requests in nanoseconds
                                flags: readable, writable
                                Unsigned Integer64. Range: 0 - 18446744073709551615 Default: 0
        name                : The name of the object
                                flags: readable, writable, 0x2000
                                String. Default: "h266enc0"
        parent              : The parent of the object
                                flags: readable, writable, 0x2000
                                Object of type "GstObject"
        qos                 : Handle Quality-of-Service events from downstream
                                flags: readable, writable
                                Boolean. Default: false
        qp                  : QP for P slices in (implied) CQP mode (-1 = disabled)
                                flags: readable, writable
                                Integer. Range: -1 - 51 Default: 32

To test the element, a GStreamer tool named ‘gst-launch’ can be used to test a simple pipeline as shown in figure below.

Note that in the above case the GST plugin is configured to use the VVenC encoder. The above pipeline can be tested using the following command:

    gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc ! video/x-raw,format=I420_10LE, width=256,height=256 ! h266enc bitrate=1000000 ! filesink   location=videotestsrc.266

License

GstH266Enc is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause Clear License

Citations

If you use this project, please cite the relevant original publications, and cite this project as:

@inproceedings{rajjvaed2022gsth266enc,
  title={GSTH266enc: A GStreamer Plugin for VVC Encoder},
  author={Rajjvaed, Advaiit and Puri, Saurabh and Bhullar, Gurdeep and Martin-Cocher, Ga{\"e}lle},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Multimedia in Asia},
  pages={1--3},
  year={2022}
}