Vulkan Video Encode - Simple Example

This is a very simple example of how to use the Vulkan Video Encode Extension. It should provide a possibility to see the basic video encoding workflow.

Dependencies

This example needs the Vulkan SDK and a compatible GPU, no other dependencies are needed.

• Minimum NVIDIA driver version: 551.23.0.0
• Minimum Vulkan SDK: 1.3.275.0 (including VMA & Volk)
• Tested with: Windows 11 / Visual Studio 2022
• Tested on: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070

Compile & Run on Windows

rem clone
git clone https://github.com/clemy/vulkan-video-encode-simple.git
cd vulkan-video-encode-simple

rem compile (use Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt)
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .

rem run
Debug\headless.exe

rem play the video file
ffplay hwenc.264

If you use a different platform, please adapt the directory names, especially also for the shaders in the source code.

Contact

• Developed by Bernhard C. Schrenk [email protected]
  • as part of the courses Cloud Gaming & Practical Course 1
• supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Helmut Hlavacs [email protected]
  • University of Vienna - https://www.univie.ac.at/
  • Research Group EDEN - Education, Didactics and Entertainment Computing
    https://eden.cs.univie.ac.at/
• see also the Vienna Vulkan Engine
  • https://github.com/hlavacs/ViennaVulkanEngine
  • a Vulkan based render engine meant for learning and teaching the Vulkan API

How it works

Frames are generated using a dynamic graphics pipeline rendering directly into RGB images (headless). Those frames are then converted into YCbCr (using a compute shader) and encoded using Vulkan into an H.264 video. The video packets are copied back to the host and stored in a file ./hwenc.264. This is an H.264 elementary stream which can be viewed with ffmpeg/ffplay (or VLC).

The encoder will generate a video stream with a simple GOP structure consisting of 1 IDR frame and 15 P frames.
The device initialization and frame generation is in main.cpp. All of the video encoding code is in videoencoder.cpp and h264parameterset.hpp.

Disclaimer

Even if it is working, it is not thought to be complete and may fail on other hardware. If you search for a more sophisticated (but also more complex) example I would suggest you look at the vk_video_samples from Nvidia.