The jetson-ffmpeg package accelerates portions of the ffmpeg audio and video conversion tool on the Jetson Nano. My initial tests show 25% speedups on m4a conversions from files that originate on Youtube. The build process depends on having a current version of Jetpack software.
My first attempt at building the software failed, with the issue described on Github as Can't build due to error with LIB_V4L2. In short, the version of Jetpack I had on my Jetson Nano was too old, so the first half of the task involved updating the Nano.
Lots of old instructions for upgrading the Nano start with the idea that you should just burn a new SD card. More recent versions can be updated "over the air" (OTA) through normal Ubuntu apt configuration instructions. Here I cannot guide you, but just let you know that I started with a system that did not have the current Jetpack installed, and I ended up with one that did have it installed. I followed the docs here on "To upgrade to new minor release", as well as tracking through this discussion on getting a current PUBKEY for the release.
I'm promised by the docs that future upgrades will be easier; this one took some searching and about half an hour of puzzlement.
After doing this, the actual installation of the jetson-ffmpeg
package was uneventful. The LIB_V4L2 error disappeared when the
new Jetpack software was installed, and the compile time of the
patched ffmpeg was about 25 minutes on this Jetson Nano using
an SD card and make -j 4
.
One test harness I have for this new software is
youtube-dlc, a
fork of the youtube-dl
tool for pulling video off of Youtube and converting it to audio-only.
Under the covers, these youtube downloaders use ffmpeg to do their
file format conversions, and offer the option --ffmpeg-location PATH
to pick which version of ffmpeg to use.
My test run was fairly simple, using audio from "Vielmetti y su combo". The results I got converting Youtube to m4a audio were encouraging but not spectacular.
accelerated ffmpeg: real 0m26.363s
regular ffmpeg: real 0m38.473s
So about 25% faster, but still on a file that took no evident time to download, it still looks like it's a significant fraction of real time to do the work.
More about Vielmetti y so combo on Mercado Libre, a commerce site in Argentina.