Investigate hardware acceleration options

[yarikoptic]

Relates to

• Investigate lossless compressions #4

We better "upgrade" our reprostim box to something which could do encoding in hardware: see https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro .

[yarikoptic]

related: by adding monitoring and running psychopy we also got load up especially during those times

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                                     
 224686 reprost+  20   0 3055344 712088 173760 R  84.3   2.2  62:58.78 PTB mainthread                                                                                              
 224572 reprost+  20   0 1125428 175320 109364 S  49.0   0.5  33:35.66 ffmpeg       

where we spend CPU to present (need to see to tune XOrg may be) and to grab videos. With more efficient hardware we should get more efficient in this timing

[CodyCBakerPhD]

Still looking into this and can't make a full recommendation until I can try it out for myself to be sure, but a cursory analysis has led to some things:

1. If the device is referred to for 'capture' purposes more than likely it doesn't support hardware encoding via ffmpeg

2. Devices used for 'streaming' seem to be built more for encoding purposes

3. If sticking with MageWell, would need something from the Ultra Stream line

   • Users report success with H.264 at 8 Mbps - no stats on %CPU usage

4. Or as previously discussed, just getting an actual mini computer such as an MeLE Overlock is nearly equivalent to such devices

5. To help narrow down which hardware we want, it would help to pick which codec we want since certain CPU/GPU support different combinations of H.264/QSV/AMF

   • Otherwise I guess I can do my best to get an unconditional idea of which overall method might work best

6. Just noting that almost none of the options I've seen come by default with DVI ports; nearly all require HDMI, so just letting you know we might need to swap the VGA -> DVI cable for a VGA -> HDMI ; I don't know if that is better or worse though since both the DVI and HDMI are digital rather than the source analog

A nice reference I've found for this is: https://github.com/Proryanator/encoder-benchmark?tab=readme-ov-file#minimum-system-specs-suggested

[yarikoptic]

GPU: Nvidia/AMD/Intel Arc GPU w/ a hardware encoder,

;) that's pretty much what we are to figure out indeed. I do not have idea/preference on H.264/QSV/AMF choices. the MeLe computer is what we have, but I do not think it supports much of encoding if any... will try that tool later, may be it would say different. May be there is some lightweight one with a compatible nvidia?