Could AMD change the face of digital FPV?
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- čas přidán 8. 05. 2023
- #rcplane #drones Chipmaker AMD has announced a new high performance video codec ASIC that points the way for future digital FPV systems. With latency as low as 8mS and resolutions of up to 8K with support for the highly efficient AV1 format, as well as older H264 and H265, silicon like this will only make our digital FPV experience even better.
The product page for the AMD:
www.xilinx.com/applications/d...
For more information on why a codec like this is so important, check out my video explaining how the DJI and HDZero systems work:
• Whiteboard: How digit...
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/ rcmodelreviews - Věda a technologie
I missed you Bruce and was very happy to see you and hear you after a long time. Have a good day my friend
Hello Bruce, it's nice to see that you are still living, and you look fine.
Always on the cutting edge with an eye towards the future. Thank you for the years of information and inspiration Bruce.
I’ve not seen you here for a while, but felt like I had to comment, your new intro is out of this world! Makes me feel like a real space cadet ! Good on ya Mate!!😊
My god. Seeing the hobby evolve from low pixel analog to hd digital was amazing. If we witness 4k FPV in the next gen, I will die happy. Awesome stuff as usual!
Great observation Bruce! Once AMD downsizes this new architecture down into Xilinx Edge compute or SoM boards; I'll wager there's a good chance that third party companies could get access to the encoding chips.
I cant wait to (try) and build an ADSB receiver/display project you have been working on.
The major challenge with digital FPV is the need to adapt for constantly changing radio quality, using two-way communication between the encoder and decoder to get adaptive bitrate and error correction and still maintain a low latency. But as luck will have it there is a big market for low latency cloud game streaming and live streaming over internet in general. Meaning there is a lot of R&D and money going into making solutions that solve the same kind of problems as with FPV.
There is certainly some great applications for real time streaming with this device. Some of the tech could be applied to FPV and wireless VR .
8ms is just for the compression. Don't forget it needs to be transmitted and uncompressed on the other side to get the full latency.
Transmission is light-speed (ie: 1 nS per foot) so if you're flying 1,000 feet away the propagation delay adds only 1 microsecond of extra latency :-)
Also, decoding a stream is generally *much* faster than encoding it (by an order of magnitude or more) so this could still provide a very low glass-to-glass latency.
I was thinking the same, we only know the total glass to glass for the current systems, for all we know the dji encoder is also around 8-10ms, then you have to add the camera latency, decode latency, and display latency, it might be the same 20-40ms.
The future is exciting Bruce!
Fascinating stuff indeed, Bruce! 😃
Let's see who's the first company to jump into this!
Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
I can see them hitting the action/security camera market though, and that's the pipe that FPV hangs off the end of.
Looks promising indeed. Still hope to see open hardware for this.
Interesting. AMD has shifted their technology into building modular chips & then piecing them together which gives them flexibility. My bet is that while it’s likely not going to be AMD hardware there will be a mobile phone chip manufacturer that makes something that translates into the niche market that we are.
I’m saving NOW for the Pre Order!!! ✊😅
Hey Bruce, since you're one of the tinkerers and even developed a lot with the raspberry pi (ADSB). By any chance did you ever try one of the opensource digital systems ? If you have any interest I would love to help you setup OpenHD (since I am one of the lead devs). I'm not really able to send you hardware since we're completely non-profit, but most likely you have about 90% of the hardware you need. We also did have ADSB integration in our osd, before we have rewritten almost everything, but plan to reintegrate it in the near future. Btw. great to see new videos on the rcmodelreviews channel, I feared you would have dropped this part of your youtube presence.
We also invested a lot of time making OpenHD working on X86 so AV1 is in theory doable with an X86 setup ;). With rockship hardware we could in the future even hw-decode AV1, but I didn't see any hw-encoder on any SBC, yet.
I hope you and the OpenHD guys sort out a low (enough) latency and small (enough) system for HD FPV. Pulling for you guys. I am sick of the abuse from DJI.
@@DavidTaghehchian we're working on much smaller hardware with much better latency, just needs a lot of time and hopefully only one more prototype generation
@@OpenHD-Official great to hear. Thanks for all the hard work.
the pcie link to the chip might be a limitation as you'd need to convert your video feed to the pcie bus. I think for this to take off, you'd need an ASIC that would directly take in a raw camera feed.
Would it be possible to come up with a miniature digital system like the all-in-one analog cameras? I fly a lot of sub 250 now because of the rule change
Walksnail
@@cinemoriahFPV I just didn't that's it heavily into the full DJI setup was it Kydex fpv camera. I wish I'd have known about the other setup before I bought mine
I know Alveo cards from times before AMD bought Xilinx - a company which makes FPGAs. Similiar encoder block is embedded for example into Kria K26 System on Module but with a lack of AV1 support. This module consumes around 5-10W. The encoder itself consumes very little power (below 0.5W), but the rest of the system (memory, CPUs...,) takes the biggest part of power draw.
In the FPGAs you can even implement codecs with latency in microseconds range. But the compression ratio in this case is far from what AV1 can offer.
Surveillance cameras is a huge market, though, regarding the market for single-stream versions.
AV1 seems power hungry on the encode, being more aimed at reducing bandwidth when it comes to huge scale distribution of video over the "series of tubes" that make up the internet.
1W per security cam seems pretty terrible, but maybe I'm wrong
1W per stream is awesomely good compared to the current crop of ASICs being used for digital FPV systems.
AV1 is going to be great for everyone.
Intel and Qualcomm have also released an encoder chip I believe
Looks interesting...
What would sell like hot cakes is a stable long range HD FPV system VTX for less than $100 USD per Plane or Quad...
Is there also a plan to review HDZero?
I feel like this is what the next generation on DJI's video system will be based on
If raw encoding speed is all you are looking for , plenty of cheap Arm SoCs can already handle 4k60, 1080p120 etc... Pretty sure even the Allwinner chip used in HDZero goggles can compress/encode and decode video at 1080p60 / 720p 120 fps or higher. iirc the spec sheet of it's older variant even mentioned 720p 240 fps. So that will be like 4ms for encoding. 4ms for decoding. 2-3 ms for transmission etc.. in ideal case that all adds up to around 10-12ms of latency. But have to see what other components add how much latency. The openhd guys had neat benchmarks of doing all this on jetson nano.
yeah, but the Jetson is a power-hog and *big/heavy* for FPV use :-) Also, it's the AV1 support that I find most interesting because that has the potential to reduce bandwidth requirements by as much as 30 percent over other codecs.
The Xilinx acquisition has paid off and AMD's using ASICs themselves now, at 35W, Alveo MA35D is nice, but a Netint Quadra T1A VPU will do the same at 20W so not ground breaking.
They do look promising for AV1.
it looks like the board supports two channels because it has two CHIPS on it. so the premise that you could make the chip smaller cutting it down to one channel doesn't seem to hold. anyway, extremely interesting stuff indeed!
But each chip can handle 32 concurrent streams so a single-stream version should be smaller.
@@RCModelReviews oh, I see! yes, then you're absolutely right. thanks for explaining! 👍
Espressif has anounced the ESP32-P4 in January. It is a beefed-up microcontroller (2x400 MHz RISC-V, external RAM, lots of IO) with an built-in H264 Encoder, as well as fast digital IO for modern and legacy camera modules (MIPI CSI/DSI/Parallel etc). This chip could turn out to be THE chip for digital FPV systems. It can interface external Wifi and Cellular modems via SDIO or USB. One can build a very compact and cheap (probably below 60$) digital FPV system, similar to OpenHD, with this chip.
Esp cam projects I've seen are very low quality, low framerate, like chugging with only 300x200 at 1fps. H264 (mpeg-4) ancient at this point too
@@Username-qx9gk You are mixing things up: the ESP-P4 has nothing to do with the ESP-CAM, which uses the ESP32-D0WD. The recently announced P4 chip is in a different class in terms of processing power, compared to any ESP32 variants which are currently available. I'm an electrical engineer with a focus on embedded hardware: i know from first hand experience that the ESP32 is capable of pumping out an encrypted MJPEG stream at roughly 640x480 30hz without breaking a sweat. I wrote my own variant of the ESP32 CAM firmware that achieves this by splitting JPEG frames into encrypted 1400 byte chunks that fit into single UDP packets and sending these to a server that decrypts and reassembles them into a fluid video stream. I use this as a portable webcam/security cam regularly, it works really well. That was done on the old ESP32 CAM hardware. The P4 chip will have external memory support, faster cores and H264 encoding in hardware, allowing it to keep large uncompressed images in RAM and then process them into a video stream. This is NOT in any way comparable to what the ESP32 CAM is capable of. H264 is 100x better than not having a video codec at all, you cannot do meaningful video encoding on a small microcontroller without dedicated hardware, which is also why it's a bit difficult to get fluid high res video from the ESP32, the bandwidth needed is very large since it cannot compress the still frames into a video stream, it just sends out individual image frames.
@@vatterger I stand corrected! In that case will definitely be interesting to see how capable this new one is I (incorrectly) figured P4 was just another esp32 dev board.
No WiFi on this new chip? If not I wonder how it will handle doing everything at once, or if bitrate settings could change based on network conditions, or how the licencing will work for h264
But counting encode+decode shouldn’t you double the time to 16ms ?
No. Encoding is the hard part. Decoding is trivial in comparison. That's by design: you need to be able to decode the video on pretty low-power devices, so the codecs are optimised for easy decoding.
Decoding is usually way faster. Think file encoding like zip.
Holy cow Bruce you're using Linux Mint!!! Me too! Have you found a video editor you like? I'm using Openshot but it's klugy.
Yeah, I've been using Linux for decades and the Mint distro for many years. Davinci Resolve is available for linux but unless you get the (paid) studio version it's pretty useless for making CZcams videos because of the minimal CODEC support. ie: the free one won't even render MP4 files or audio.
The only Windows PC in the place is solely for video editing with Resolve.
Just wanted to get back into FPV after a 10 year break for school. Turns out all my old planes and quads are now illegal to fly in the EU.. cant even fly my little AXN on a remote field without having to register it and pay for exams every year
Is not complying with stupid laws an option for you?
@@rjung_ch well I'm in the Netherlands, pretty much no nature and a lot of people. Really tempted to just take my skyhunter to a field or the beach for a long range mission but I think the risk of getting caught is too high. I might when I move to Sweden though. Doubt anyone would even notice it there up north.
Just a shame they made these annoying laws. It was such a fun hobby.
@@ugandanknuckles3429 I feel for you, these new laws are made for commercialisation of the air space from 0 to 200m above the ground. It's been in the making for a few years now, they are pushing it like crazy around the anglophone world. It is a stupid move, it's all about companies allowing to use that space to make money. They don't give a damned about the kids, the hobby and the fun it brings.
Vulture capitalism is pushing this.
In Sweden you will have soo much space, you're right about that.
Good luck and have fun!
Hi Bruce. Having problems flying in Texas, due to insurance issues?!
8ms is likely chip latency. Add camera, modem twice and display latency
true
Not really. The decode is usually *much* faster than the encode - up to an order of magnitude faster in fact. You only have to compare the time it takes to render an H264 video on your computer compared to the rate at which you can display the same video.
@@RCModelReviews you can expect around 1 frame of latency on radio transmission if your link is near full utilization (it should be reasonably close to that for good video quality) with the chip you mention 20-24ms+ camera and display delays would be minimal latency at near maximum video quality.
So the equivalent to a "Steam deck" as a controller ( set up for flight controls ) with a USB like cable to your goggles and a Flight controller that connects properly. OK, the hand held controller is slightly heavier but the goggles are lighter. The on-board controller shouldn't be any worse than existing. OR if you don't want to be tethered to the controller, well this card can handle two streams and your goggles will not need as much receiver power.
Sounds good if it works.
I’d pay more.
I just see you. For a year and got a DJI system. Did I waste my money
This latency is not "glass to glass". HDZero and Analog will always beat any encoded source.
Forget AMD, what are you working at? What's that box? 🤔
Well, interesting, but I exclusively use analog on everything from 65mm indoor whoop to 4" prop FPV, which is as big as I go given the 250g rules.
Typically, except on the smallest, a Happymodel combined ELRS receiver and VTx transmitter weighing in at 2.1g (~£18) and a Caddx Ant lite, 1.5g (~£14). Low weight = performance, low cost = good news.
I use Skyzone 02c goggles, and at the moment see no reason to change.
It depends on one's personal use case - racing in my case, but the video quality is absolutely adequate for my purposes, it's light, small and cheap.
When digital video rivals the cost and weight of that, I'll think about it, or, more likely, when in the end digital pushes analog out of the market and I'm forced to.
Up to that point, it's not for me.
We should not rely on greedy corporation to help us. I thought we already learned that lesson by now.
Corporations aren't here to please people, they are here to MAKE MONEY.
True. I hope to see open hardware soon enough.
I've had this idea for years that we could reduce construction operation of heavy equipment by making them FPV and hiring people from Pakistan, India, etc to run our heavy equipment from across the globe. Low latency would be key in making it work. Robotic operators may come before this becomes reasonable though.
you have clearly never operated heavy equipment, that would be extraordinarily dangerous and stupid. You *might* be able to get away with it, right up to the moment that you don't. And that moment will be at the absolute worst possible time. But hey, thanks for trying so hard to cut out the western working man.
@@earth9531I think they're just expressing an idea they had lol, it's not that deep
Great idea. Offshore more jobs 🙄
What could possibly go wrong? And the repair suggests would be interesting. 😅
Linux Mint. 👍
Why should I wanna pay more for a chip and tech that is mass produced and therefore a lot cheaper than the 250000 units per year sold to the fpv community ?
More or less I am out of this better faster longer race cause the current digital system fit my needs except the price tag
the cost of the air systems are too high to be able to equip all my wings with those even though most of them have already fc built in and therefore camera and vtx would be perfect too.
So I am no longer spending big money and investments into the rc hobby, more smaller and different planes especially foam or flite test builts that last long and offer great fun for the money too cause you get the build fly and repair adventure and challengs as in the good old balsa days but with a much faster gratification in my experience.
Therefore i am also investigating the free fpv system based on ordroitd and raspberry pis or jetson nanos and had been following curry kittens adventures over the past 3 years with open however it is called and always forget.
Mmm unfortunately seeing the use of drones in Ukraines battles against the Russian War I can see this going straight into that. Literally every bit counts as an advantage…..imo. Laurie