Video (experimental)

The virtio video decoder and encoder devices allow a guest to leverage the host's hardware-accelerated video decoding and encoding capabilities. The specification (v3, v5) for these devices is still a work-in-progress, so testing them requires an out-of-tree kernel driver on the guest.

The virtio-video host device uses backends to perform the actual decoding. The currently supported backends are:

libvda, a hardware-accelerated backend that supports both decoding and encoding by delegating the work to a running instance of Chrome. It can only be built and used in a ChromeOS environment.
ffmpeg, a software-based backend that supports encoding and decoding. It exists to make testing and development of virtio-video easier, as it does not require any particular hardware and is based on a reliable codec library.

The rest of this document will solely focus on the ffmpeg backend. More accelerated backends will be added in the future.

Guest kernel requirements

The virtio_video branch of this kernel git repository contains a work-in-progress version of the virtio-video guest kernel driver, based on a (hopefully) recent version of mainline Linux. If you use this as your guest kernel, the virtio_video_defconfig configuration should allow you to easily boot from crosvm, with the video (and a few other) virtio devices support built-in.

Quick building guide after checking out this branch:

mkdir build_crosvm_x86
make O=build_crosvm_x86 virtio_video_defconfig
make O=build_crosvm_x86 -j16

The resulting kernel image that can be passed to crosvm will be in build_crosvm_x86/arch/x86/boot/bzImage.

Crosvm requirements

The virtio-video support is experimental and needs to be opted-in through the "video-decoder" or "video-encoder" Cargo feature. In the instruction below we'll be using the FFmpeg backend which requires the "ffmpeg" feature to be enabled as well.

The following example builds crosvm with FFmpeg encoder and decoder backend support:

cargo build --features "video-encoder,video-decoder,ffmpeg"

To enable the decoder device, start crosvm with the --video-decoder=ffmpeg command-line argument:

crosvm run --disable-sandbox --video-decoder=ffmpeg -c 4 -m 2048 --block /path/to/disk.img,root --serial type=stdout,hardware=virtio-console,console=true,stdin=true /path/to/bzImage

Alternatively, to enable the encoder device, start crosvm with the --video-encoder=ffmpeg command-line argument:

crosvm run --disable-sandbox --video-encoder=ffmpeg -c 4 -m 2048 --block /path/to/disk.img,root --serial type=stdout,hardware=virtio-console,console=true,stdin=true /path/to/bzImage

If the guest kernel includes the virtio-video driver, then the device should be probed and show up.

Testing the device from the guest

Video capabilities are exposed to the guest using V4L2. The encoder or decoder device should appear as /dev/videoX, probably /dev/video0 if there are no additional V4L2 devices.

Checking capabilities and formats

v4l2-ctl, part of the v4l-utils package, can be used to test the device's existence.

Example output for the decoder is shown below.

v4l2-ctl -d/dev/video0 --info
Driver Info:
        Driver name      : virtio-video
        Card type        : ffmpeg
        Bus info         : virtio:stateful-decoder
        Driver version   : 5.17.0
        Capabilities     : 0x84204000
                Video Memory-to-Memory Multiplanar
                Streaming
                Extended Pix Format
                Device Capabilities
        Device Caps      : 0x04204000
                Video Memory-to-Memory Multiplanar
                Streaming
                Extended Pix Format

Note that the Card type is ffmpeg, indicating that decoding will be performed in software on the host. We can then query the support input (OUTPUT in V4L2-speak) formats, i.e. the encoded formats we can send to the decoder:

v4l2-ctl -d/dev/video0 --list-formats-out
ioctl: VIDIOC_ENUM_FMT
        Type: Video Output Multiplanar

        [0]: 'VP90' (VP9, compressed)
        [1]: 'VP80' (VP8, compressed)
        [2]: 'HEVC' (HEVC, compressed)
        [3]: 'H264' (H.264, compressed)

Similarly, you can check the supported output (or CAPTURE) pixel formats for decoded frames:

v4l2-ctl -d/dev/video0 --list-formats
ioctl: VIDIOC_ENUM_FMT
        Type: Video Capture Multiplanar

        [0]: 'NV12' (Y/CbCr 4:2:0)

Test decoding with ffmpeg

FFmpeg can be used to decode video streams with the virtio-video device.

Simple VP8 stream:

wget https://github.com/chromium/chromium/raw/main/media/test/data/test-25fps.vp8
ffmpeg -codec:v vp8_v4l2m2m -i test-25fps.vp8 test-25fps-%d.png

This should create 250 PNG files each containing a decoded frame from the stream.

WEBM VP9 stream:

wget https://test-videos.co.uk/vids/bigbuckbunny/webm/vp9/720/Big_Buck_Bunny_720_10s_1MB.webm
ffmpeg -codec:v vp9_v4l2m2m -i Big_Buck_Bunny_720_10s_1MB.webm Big_Buck_Bunny-%d.png

Should create 300 PNG files at 720p resolution.

Test decoding with v4l2r

The v4l2r Rust crate also features an example program that can use this driver to decode simple H.264 streams:

git clone https://github.com/Gnurou/v4l2r
cd v4l2r
wget https://github.com/chromium/chromium/raw/main/media/test/data/test-25fps.h264
cargo run --example simple_decoder test-25fps.h264 /dev/video0 --input_format h264 --save test-25fps.nv12

This will decode test-25fps.h264 and write the raw decoded frames in NV12 format into test-25fps.nv12. You can check the result with e.g. YUView.

Test encoding with ffmpeg

FFmpeg can be used to encode video streams with the virtio-video device.

The following examples generates a test clip through libavfilter and encode it using the virtual H.264, H.265 and VP8 encoder, respectively. (VP9 v4l2m2m support is missing in FFmpeg for some reason.)

# H264
ffmpeg -f lavfi -i smptebars=duration=10:size=640x480:rate=30 \
  -pix_fmt nv12 -c:v h264_v4l2m2m smptebars.h264.mp4
# H265
ffmpeg -f lavfi -i smptebars=duration=10:size=640x480:rate=30 \
  -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v hevc_v4l2m2m smptebars.h265.mp4
# VP8
ffmpeg -f lavfi -i smptebars=duration=10:size=640x480:rate=30 \
  -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v vp8_v4l2m2m smptebars.vp8.webm

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