README

ROS2 FFMPeg encoder/decoder

This ROS2 package supports encoding/decoding with the FFMpeg library, for example encoding h264 and h265 or HEVC, using Nvidia or other hardware acceleration when available. This package is meant to be used by image transport plugins like the ffmpeg image transport.

Supported systems

Continuous integration is tested under Ubuntu with the following ROS2 distros:

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Installation

From packages

sudo apt-get install ros-${ROS_DISTRO}-ffmpeg-encoder-decoder

From source

Set the following shell variables:

repo=ffmpeg_encoder_decoder
url=https://github.com/ros-misc-utilities/${repo}.git

and follow the instructions here

Make sure to source your workspace’s install/setup.bash afterwards.

Parameters

This package has no parameters. It is the upper layer’s responsibility to e.g. manage the mapping between encoder and decoder, i.e. to tell the decoder class which libav decoder should be used for the decoding, or to set the encoding parameters.

How to use a custom version of libav (aka ffmpeg)

Compile and install ffmpeg. Let’s say the install directory is /home/foo/ffmpeg/build, then for it to be found while building, run colcon like this:

colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args --no-warn-unused-cli -DFFMPEG_PKGCONFIG=/home/foo/ffmpeg/build/lib/pkgconfig -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo

This will compile against the right headers, but at runtime it may still load the system ffmpeg libraries. To avoid that, set LD_LIBRARY_PATH at runtime:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/foo/ffmpeg/build/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}

How to use ffmpeg hardware accelerated encoding on the NVidia Jetson

Follow the instructions here to build a version of ffmpeg that supports NVMPI. Then follow the section above on how to actually use that custom ffmpeg library. As always first test on the CLI that the newly compiled ffmpeg command now supports h264_nvmpi. Afterwards you should be able to use e.g. the ffmpeg_image_transport with parameters like so:

The transport can now be configured to use nvmpi like so:

        parameters=[{'ffmpeg_image_transport.encoding': 'h264_nvmpi',
                     'ffmpeg_image_transport.profile': 'main',
                     'ffmpeg_image_transport.preset': 'll',
                     'ffmpeg_image_transport.gop': 15}]

License

This software is issued under the Apache License Version 2.0.