[Spice-devel] RFC: Integrating Virgil and Spice

[Dave Airlie]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 11:10 PM, Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel at redhat.com> wrote:
>> >

> IIRC some high-end nvidia gfx cards (which can be partitioned for
> virtual machines) can encode the guests display as H.264 stream in
> hardware.
>
> Given that there are use cases for hardware assisted video encoding in
> the consumer space too (beam your android tablet display to the smart tv
> over wifi) I wouldn't be surprised if video encoding support is
> commonplace in gpus in near future (maybe it even is there today).
>
> That'll make sending a H.264 stream as display channel an interesting
> option.  Should be a reasonable efficient protocol, with the ability to
> offload alot of the actual work to the gpu on both server and client
> side.

I think nearly all GPUs, Intel ones included can do on-board H264 encoding now,
the vaapi for Intel exports this ability, not sure how to expose it on
non-intel GPUs,
or how they expose it under Windows etc.

The problem for us is the usual patent minefield around h264.

Dave.