UxPlay uses GStreamer Plugins for rendering audio and video, This means that video and audio are supported “out of the box”, using a choice of plugins. AirPlay streams video in h264 format: gstreamer decoding is plugin agnostic, and uses accelerated GPU hardware h264 decoders if available; if not, software decoding is used.
For systems with Intel integrated graphics, hardware GPU decoding with the gstreamer VAAPI plugin is preferable. VAAPI is open-source, and in addition to Intel, can support some AMD GPU’s (the open-source “Nouveau” drivers for NVIDIA graphics are also in principle supported when VAAPI is supplemented with firmware extracted from the proprietary NVIDIA drivers).
-For NVIDIA graphics with the proprietary drivers, the nvh264dec plugin (included in gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad since GStreamer-1.18.0) can be used for accelerated video decoding on the NVIDIA GPU after NVIDIA’s CUDA driver libcuda.so is installed. This plugin should be used with options uxplay -vd nvh264dec -vs glimagesink. For GStreamer-1.16 or earlier, the plugin is called nvdec, and must be built by the user, using NVIDIA’s proprietary Video Codec SDK. This must be downloaded, and three header files from it must be added to the gstreamer source before the plugin can be compiled: see these instructions. This older form of the plugin should be used with the -vd nvdec -vs glimagesink uxplay options.
For NVIDIA graphics with the proprietary drivers, the nvh264dec plugin (included in gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad since GStreamer-1.18.0) can be used for accelerated video decoding on the NVIDIA GPU after NVIDIA’s CUDA driver libcuda.so is installed. This plugin should be used with options uxplay -vd nvh264dec -vs glimagesink. For GStreamer-1.16 or earlier, the plugin is called nvdec, and must be built by the user, using header files from NVIDIA’s proprietary Video Codec SDK: see these instructions. This older form of the plugin should be used with the -vd nvdec -vs glimagesink uxplay options.
GPU Support for Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi (RPi) computers can run UxPlay with software decoding of h264 video (options uxplay -rpi -avdec) but this usually has unacceptable latency, and hardware-accelerated decoding by the Pi’s built-in Broadcom GPU should be used. RPi OS (Bullseye) has abandoned the omx (OpenMAX) driver used till now for this by RPiPlay, in favor of v4l2 (Video4Linux2). The GStreamer Video4Linux2 plugin only works with UxPlay since GStreamer-1.21.0.0 on the development branch, but a (partial) backport to 1.18.4 for RPi OS (Bullseye) has already appeared in current updates. In case the full update has not yet appeared, or you are using a different distribution, you can find patching instructions in the UxPlay Wiki. Use the options uxplay -rpi ( or uxplay -rpi -vs kmssink on RPi OS Lite with no X11) with the patched GStreamer. Patches for GStreamer-1.18.5 (used in Ubuntu 21.10 for RPi) and GStreamer-1.20.0 (used in Manjaro for RPi) are also available there.