Processor selection for Video decoding and streaming Application

Gaming and Visualization Technologies Visualization Video Processing & Optical Flow
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1

Hi,
I am looking for a good processor for one of my video streaming application. Application is about decoding the 8 video stream and stream over the server for live view. The video stream will be displayed in display connected to the device in local. We will be using the 8 IP camera in the network for video streaming.

Thanks in advance

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What resolution are the streams and what is your target framerate? What is the video codec type (H264, hevc, AV1)? I have profiled many NVIDIA cards for encode/decode over the years.

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We are looking for below specifications:
No. of IP camera video stream : 8
Resolution : 1080p / 720p
Framerate : 25/30fps
Codec : H.264/H.265

4

This should give you some indication of how fast decoding is. This is with the lowly 1650 (worst case, cheapest). 8 x streams, H264, simulating about 30 fps (~30ms sleep between submissions). This is the average time to decode a frame in ms. Note that I have not included how you acquire the frame and any processing you do with it before/after in timings. This is purely decode of the frame.

Note that this is the average speed. Some frames will occassionally be far worse than the average. These can be dropped as “late”. They’re relatively rare in the grand scheme of things.

So, this is probably close to your worst case. I would recommend 40xx series card as that gives you the option to use AV1 should you desire (better compression at same bitrate) and the H264 decode speed will be shrugged off.

I forgot to mention: the frames were encoded with the highest Main setting, and have b-frames. If you’re low latency streaming, you can probably get away with a lower quality profile for increased performance.

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Especially if your application is intended to be a product rather than a service, if it is ok for you to use Linux/Ubuntu (or Yocto), and if you don’t have thousands of simultaneous clients connected, you may consider the NVIDIA Jetson devices family, where all devices have HW NVDEC (available codecs depend on sw release and Jetson model) and hw NVENC (depends on models and sw release, Orin Nano has no NVENC, though if you just want to re-stream in same format, you wouldn’t have to decode/re-encode). This may enable your requirements for just a few watts.