From camera to screen: Forging Vulkan-accelerated codecs in FFmpeg

Speaker: Lynne

Session description:
Video codecs are designed to serve a purpose, whether its general video compression for the web, or low-latency high-speed/quality for editing, with custom hardware designed for them to run on. For codecs designed to be general-purpose, such hardware is abundant.
For professional video codecs, such hardware is highly-specialized, expensive, limited, and proprietary.

Computers nowadays come with high-performance general-purpose GPUs, that do less and less graphics.
This session will cover the techniques of how custom serial compression meant for special hardware, was parallized and made to run on GPUs.
The results were efficient codec implementations, able to run on any platform, thus liberating users from requiring special hardware.

Finally, the talk will cover how this technology enabled the entire cinema creation pipeline, from camera to screen, to be performed on regular GPUs using free and open-source tools.

Speaker Profile:
Lynne is a codec engineer, member of the Alliace for Open Media and Khronos, working on FFmpeg. She worked on AV1, the Vulkan specifications, wrote and maintains multiple encoders, decoders, and assembly for FFmpeg. Currently, she is moving into cinematography and filmmaking.