Encoding Videos

… or the quest for low power hardware assisted video encoding…

My hardware zoo is growing rapidly (thanks to my wife being patient with my attraction to new toys). Unfortunately, although most of my new toys have either a screen or an hdmi interface, they are not all playing all video formats. Plus, I don’t want to have mpeg transport streams (dvb-t recordings) lying around. On the other hand, I don’t want to heat my living room having my laptop doing H264-encoding on it’s CPU.

I bought an elgato h264 turbo (plus the hd version, which features a Maxim MG3500), but these are only supported on Apple MacOS X. It looks like the software sends a blob to the USB stick (firmware), then the parameters and finally the stream to encode. A lot to reverse engineer if I want to get it to run – back to eBay I guess.

Two recent purchases I’ve made are a Raspberry Pi and an Allwinner A10 based Mk802 „android stick“. It turns out, that both devices have hardware h264 encoding capability. The Pi hardware encoding isn’t usable yet since the necessary driver is closed source and so far, the Raspberry Pi foundation has not yet the possibility to sell the licenses needed to use the encoding features of the BCM2835 GPU chip.

For the Mk802 I found a library on github that seems to facilitate the encoding features of the Allwinner A10 chip. Unfortunately, the only document about the encoder is mostly chinese – which I can’t read.

It would be cool to hook up ffmpeg to one of those and have my low power network encoding gadget!