Gstreamer( or NVENC) does not work on -20°(Celsius)

[harry_xiaye]

We have a product using Xavier NX. Below is our board information.
Linux txkj-nx 4.9.253-tegra

• NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX (Developer Kit Version)
  • Jetpack 4.6 [L4T 32.6.1]
  • NV Power Mode: MODE_15W_6CORE - Type: 2
  • jetson_stats.service: active
• Board info:
  • Type: Xavier NX (Developer Kit Version)
  • SOC Family: tegra194 - ID:25
  • Module: P3668 - Board: P3509-000
  • Code Name: jakku
  • CUDA GPU architecture (ARCH_BIN): 7.2
  • Serial Number: 1424920027702
• Libraries:
  • CUDA: 10.2.300
  • cuDNN: 8.2.1.32
  • TensorRT: 8.0.1.6
  • Visionworks: 1.6.0.501
  • OpenCV: 4.5.1 compiled CUDA: YES
  • VPI: ii libnvvpi1 1.1.12 arm64 NVIDIA Vision Programming Interface library
  • Vulkan: 1.2.70

We found if our product is put the low temperature environment (-20° Celsius). Gstreamer will fail to push H264 video stream. When the temperature is up to about -10°, everything is working.

Does anyone also see this kind of issues?

[DaneLLL]

Hi,
For information, so that failure is specific to using NVNEC. Other hardware engines such as NVDEC, CPU, GPU are run well. Is this correct?

[harry_xiaye]

@DaneLLL ，

CPU and GPU should be working since we still see our device can work and response.

From the log, we found GStreamer failed when push H264 video stream. We know gstreamer will use NVENC to encode H264, so guess it may be related to NVENC. We are not sure, just guess.

[harry_xiaye]

From Xavier NX specification, it can work at -25°. So -20° should not make NX HW components not work.

[harry_xiaye]

Is there any ways to debug this issue?

[DaneLLL]

Hi,
For further check, you may try the gstreamer command to confirm whether NVENC malfunctions:

$ gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc is-live=1 ! nvvidconv ! nvv4l2h264enc ! h264parse ! matroskamux ! filesink location=/tmp/test.mkv

And we have later releases Jetpack 4.6.3 and 5.1.1. You may try the release on Xavier NX developer kit and see if the issue still persists.