How fast can the Nano encode?

Hello!

I’m planning to build a DYI IRL live streaming machine much like the LiveU solo (for those who are familiar).

In short, I’ll run around with a backpack which will encode a camera feed and send it on the internet.

I plan to stream to an SRT listener (which will be in the safety of my house) which will transcode, apply post processing and other things that don’t matter since this post concerns exclusively the part pre-transcode.

Soooo I was thinking of using the Jetson Nano hardware encoder to real time encode in h265 with a quality as good as possible, we are talking a bitrate of around 5k mbps and a target resolution of 1600x900 60fps and since my research on the matter has been unfortunate I would like to know if anyone has an idea whether it is capable or not of handling such a load.

  • The hardware will be entirely dedicated to encoding and stream over ethernet, nothing else
  • The feed will most likely come from a capture card (Elgato Camlink for instance) or a webcam, I have total control over it
  • I can tune it down to 1280x720 60fps but that’s as low as I’m going
  • Quality is key - the feed shouldn’t show anything that remotely resembles to the compression artifacts seen here (they were using a raspberry pi 4)
  • I need the lowest bitrate possible as I will be streaming over cellular network, but I can choose which codec to use (most likely h265)
  • I could go with a different hardware from NVidia if there is a feasible option
  • I don’t need 4k, uhd or anything else better than the target res/fps

Thanks a lot for hearing me out! If no one had the opportunity to explore this tech I will find a way to get my hands on the hardware and post the results myself in a couple months to repay of your attention.

Cheers!

Hi,
You can refer to this post:

It is to run in CBR and set vbv-size(virtual buffer size). You may tune vbv-size and check the video quality.
Another property is

  preset-level        : HW preset level for encoder
                        flags: readable, writable, changeable only in NULL or READY state
                        Enum "GstV4L2VideoEncHwPreset" Default: 1, "UltraFastPreset"
                           (0): DisablePreset    - Disable HW-Preset
                           (1): UltraFastPreset  - UltraFastPreset for high perf
                           (2): FastPreset       - FastPreset
                           (3): MediumPreset     - MediumPreset
                           (4): SlowPreset       - SlowPreset

By default it is UltraFastPreset. You may try FastPreset and MediumPreset to have better quality.

Hi DaneLLL,
Thanks a lot for such an extensive response! As soon as I get my hands on a Nano I’ll give it a whirl.

I have a hunch (I might be wrong as it often happens) that the architecture might be designed for high-bitrate compression. Aaaa I want to test it so badly!

@SuperSnowbro Very curious about your performance findings if you’re able to share!