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On Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver x86_64, I am finding that ffmpeg is indicating the "h264_omx" encoder is available even though it is not working ("libOMXCore.so" is not available), which means the h264_video_encoder node is effectively broken on Bionic Beaver x86/x64.

Hi Guys,

It seems that you are not pulling the subscribe topic from the config.yaml

https://github.com/aws-robotics/kinesisvideo-encoder-common/blob/master/h264_encoder_core/src/h264_encoder_node_config.cpp
line 39

Thanks,

In order to comply with the LGPLv2.1 license you must provide a copy of the license, not just a link.

In our testing, HW encoding worked out of the box for RPi running Xenial (most likely because the ffmpeg was properly configured). However, we've been having difficulties getting it to work on Ubuntu Bionic.
This is tightly related to #2 , but the issue is two fold:

1. Correct detection of encoding capabilities is still not quite there. If ffmpeg was configured without --enable-omx-rpi, it will try to use libOMXCore.so, which (by default) is unavailable - only libopenmaxil.so is. The code that detects HW encoding support (#3) reports that it is available because it found libopenmaxil.so. One option to solve it, once and for all, is to actually try to open the codec (invoke avcodec_open2) as part of the check (inside is_omx_available). If it fails, fall back to SW encoding, while warning about it.

2. The bigger problem, in my mind, is that there seems to be no easy or simple way to set up the RPi for HW encoding with Bionic... the Bionic images we've tried do not come with properly-configured ffmpeg. When building ffmpeg from source there are numerous intricacies with regards to how to compile it properly (configuration flags etc.). We need to come up with a solution to simplify this, and I wouldn't rule out building & vending binaries of ffmpeg (along with all related libraries) ourselves.

With #35, there is an initial attempt to open the h264_omx encoder to detect whether or not it is available. However, the attempt to open it gives a message like:

[h264_video_encoder-11] [h264_omx @ 0xea8260] The encoder timebase is not set.

and fails to correctly identify that the encoder is actually there available and working.

I suspect this is because the h264_omx encoder is being attempted to be opened in is_codec_available() with unset parameters (where the timebase, or framerate, is not set as the error message above indicates).