OpenGL Texture Cache source... can be renderbuffer? - ios

Using OpenGL and CVOpenGLESTextureCacheCreateTextureFromImage:
In the docs here it says that the target can be GL_TEXTURE2D or GL_RENDERBUFFER: what does that mean? Can a renderbuffer bound to the framebuffer at color_attachment_0 be used to get an image?

Your question is slightly confusing.
The docs there are saying that you can push video frames into either a GL_TEXTURE2D or a GL_RENDERBUFFER.
In the first case, you can use the sampler2D in your fragment shader to look up colors from the video and put video on polyons.
In the second case, yes, you can bind the renderbuffer to your FBO there and get images using glReadPixels().
However, I wouldn't call either of these a "source" necessarily? They are targets. Unless you mean as a source for later reading?

Related

Webgl Upload Texture Data to the gpu without a draw call

I'm using webgl to do YUV to RGB conversions on a custom video codec.
The video has to play at 30 fps. In order to make this happen I'm doing all my math every other requestAnimationFrame.
This works great, but I noticed when profiling that uploading the textures to the gpu takes the longest amount of time.
So I uploaded the "Y" texture and the "UV" texture separately.
Now the first "requestAnimationFrame" will upload the "Y" texture like this:
gl.activeTexture(gl.TEXTURE0);
gl.bindTexture(gl.TEXTURE_2D, yTextureRef);
gl.texImage2D(gl.TEXTURE_2D, 0, gl.LUMINANCE, textureWidth, textureHeight, 0, gl.LUMINANCE, gl.UNSIGNED_BYTE, yData);
The second "requestAnimationFrame" will upload the "UV" texture in the same way, and make a draw call to the fragment shader doing the math between them.
But this doesn't change anything in the profiler. I still show nearly 0 gpu time on the frame that uploads the "Y" texture, and the same amount of time as before on the frame that uploads the "UV" texture.
However if I add a draw call to my "Y" texture upload function, then the profiler shows the expected results. Every frame has nearly half the gpu time.
From this I'm guessing the Y texture isn't really uploaded to the gpu using the texImage2d function.
However I don't really want to draw the Y texture on the screen as it doesn't have the correct UV texture to do anything with until a frame later. So is there any way to force the gpu to upload this texture without performing a draw call?
Update
I mis-understood the question
It really depends on the driver. The problem is OpenGL/OpenGL ES/WebGL's texture API really sucks. Sucks is a technical term for 'has unintended consequences'.
The issue is the driver can't really fully upload the data until you draw because it doesn't know what things you're going to change. You could change all the mip levels in any order and any size and then fix them all in between and so until you draw it has no idea which other functions you're going to call to manipulate the texture.
Consider you create a 4x4 level 0 mip
gl.texImage2D(
gl.TEXTURE_2D,
0, // mip level
gl.RGBA,
4, // width
4, // height
...);
What memory should it allocate? 4(width) * 4(height) * 4(rgba)? But what if you call gl.generateMipmap? Now it needs 4*4*4+2*2*4+1*1*4. Ok but now you allocate an 8x8 mip on level 3. You intend to then replace levels 0 to 2 with 64x64, 32x32, 16x16 respectively but you did level 3 first. What should it do when you replace level 3 before replacing the levels above those? You then add in levels 4 8x8, 5 as 4x4, 6 as 2x2, and 7 as 1x1.
As you can see the API lets you change mips in any order. In fact I could allocate level 7 as 723x234 and then fix it later. The API is designed to not care until draw time when all the mips must be the correct size at which point they can finally allocate memory on the GPU and copy the mips in.
You can see a demonstration and test of this issue here. The test uploads mips out of order to verify that WebGL implementations correctly fail with they are not all the correct size and correctly start working once they are the correct sizes.
You can see this was arguably a bad API design.
They added gl.texStorage2D to fix it but gl.texStorage2D is not available in WebGL1 only WebGL2. gl.texStorage2D has new issues though :(
TLDR; textures get uploaded to the driver when you call gl.texImage2D but the driver can't upload to the GPU until draw time.
Possible solution: use gl.texSubImage2D since it does not allocate memory it's possible the driver could upload sooner. I suspect most drivers don't because you can use gl.texSubImage2D before drawing. Still it's worth a try
Let me also add that gl.LUMIANCE might be a bottleneck as well. IIRC DirectX doesn't have a corresponding format and neither does OpenGL Core Profile. Both support a RED only format but WebGL1 does not. So LUMIANCE has to be emulated by expanding the data on upload.
Old Answer
Unfortunately there is no way to upload video to WebGL except via texImage2D and texSubImage2D
Some browsers try to make that happen faster. I notice you're using gl.LUMINANCE. You might try using gl.RGB or gl.RGBA and see if things speed up. It's possible browsers only optimize for the more common case. On the other hand it's possible they don't optimize at all.
Two extensions what would allow using video without a copy have been proposed but AFAIK no browser as ever implemented them.
WEBGL_video_texture
WEBGL_texture_source_iframe
It's actually a much harder problem than it sounds like.
Video data can be in various formats. You mentioned YUV but there are others. Should the browser tell the app the format or should the browser convert to a standard format?
The problem with telling is lots of devs will get it wrong then a user will provide a video that is in a format they don't support
The WEBGL_video_texture extensions converts to a standard format by re-writing your shaders. You tell it uniform samplerVideoWEBGL video and then it knows it can re-write your color = texture2D(video, uv) to color = convertFromVideoFormatToRGB(texture(video, uv)). It also means they'd have to re-write shaders on the fly if you play different format videos.
Synchronization
It sounds great to get the video data to WebGL but now you have the issue that by the time you get the data and render it to the screen you've added a few frames of latency so the audio is no longer in sync.
How to deal with that is out of the scope of WebGL as WebGL doesn't have anything to do with audio but it does point out that it's not as simple as just giving WebGL the data. Once you make the data available then people will ask for more APIs to get the audio and more info so they can delay one or both and keep them in sync.
TLDR; there is no way to upload video to WebGL except via texImage2D and texSubImage2D

How do you use Open GL ES 2.0 (shaders) for video processing?

This question is about iOS. On Android, it is very easy to use OpenGL ES 2.0 to render a texture on a view (for previewing) or to send it to an encoder (for file writing). I haven't been able to find any tutorial on iOS to achieve video playback (previewing video effect from a file) and video recording (saving a video with an effect) with shader effects. Is this something possible with iOS?
I've come across a demo about shaders called GLCameraRipple but I have no clue about how to use it more generically. Ex: With AVFoundation.
[EDIT]
I trampled on this tutorial about OpenGL ES, AVFoundation and video merging on iOS while searching for a snippet. That's another interesting entry door.
It's all very low-level stuff over in iOS land, with a whole bunch of pieces to connect.
The main thing you're likely to be interested in is CVOpenGLESTextureCache. As the CV prefix implies, it's part of Core Video, in this case its primary point of interest is CVOpenGLESTextureCacheCreateTextureFromImage which "creates a live binding between the image buffer and the underlying texture object". The documentation further provides you with explicit advice on use of such an image as a GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT — i.e. the texture ID returned is usable both as a source and as a destination for OpenGL.
The bound image buffer will be tied to a CVImageBuffer, one type of which is a CVPixelBuffer. You can supply pixel buffers to an AVAssetWriterInputPixelBufferAdaptor wired to an AVAssetWriter in order to output to a video.
In the other direction, an AVAssetReaderOutput attached to a AVAssetReader will vend CMSampleBuffers which can be queried for attached image buffers (if you've got video coming in and not just audio, there'll be some) that can then be mapped into OpenGL via a texture cache.

iOS GLKit post processing?

I have a game running using glKit, and would like to add some post processing effects using a shader after each frame has rendered.
Is it possible to do this under glKit?
This is possible.
You will need to create your own offscreen framebuffer object and associated texture. Then call [GLKView bindDrawable] to point further rendering at GLKView's framebuffer. You can then perform more rendering, including reading from the texture that you just previously rendered to.
The framebuffer API is all standard OpenGL ES calls, which you can read about in any OpenGL ES 2.0 book. Apple also has some iOS-specific documentation at http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/ipad/#documentation/3DDrawing/Conceptual/OpenGLES_ProgrammingGuide/

How to make a copy of the OpenGL ES framebuffer in iOS?

I'd like to copy the OpenGL ES framebuffer from video RAM to video RAM in my iOS game. How is this done?
Ideally I'll do this 30 times per second. Then transfer the contents of the copied buffer to the CPU piecewise (not all at once since this causes a stutter in the game).
EDIT: I would say that you should have a look into Frame Buffer Objects (FBOs), you can find an example on the following post:
https://devforums.apple.com/message/23282#23282
This will allow you to render your scene into a texture attached to a FBO and use the texture afterwards.
PS: Thanks Christian for pointing out my mistake (I first read that MrMusic wanted to copy VRAM to RAM and wrongly suggested to use glReadPixels which is indeed unsuitable for that purpose).

iOS: Video as GL texture with alpha transparency

I'm trying to figure out the best approach to display a video on a GL texture while preserving the transparency of the alpha channel.
Information about video as GL texture is here: Is it possible using video as texture for GL in iOS? and iOS4: how do I use video file as an OpenGL texture?.
Using ffmpeg to help with alpha transparency, but not app store friendly is here:
iPhone: Display a semi-transparent video on top of a UIView?
The video source would be filmed in front of a green screen for chroma keying. The video could be untouched to leave the green screen or processed in a video editing suite and exported to Quicktime Animation or Apple Pro Res 4444 with Alpha.
There are multiple approaches that I think could potentially work, but I haven't found a full solution.
Realtime threshold processing of the video looking for green to remove
Figure out how to use the above mentioned Quicktime codecs to preserve the alpha channel
Blending two videos together: 1) Main video with RGB 2) separate video with alpha mask
I would love to get your thoughts on the best approach for iOS and OpenGL ES 2.0
Thanks.
The easiest way to do chroma keying for simple blending of a movie and another scene would be to use the GPUImageChromaKeyBlendFilter from my GPUImage framework. You can supply the movie source as a GPUImageMovie, and then blend that with your background content. The chroma key filter allows you to specify a color, a proximity to that color, and a smoothness of blending to use in the replacement operation. All of this is GPU-accelerated via tuned shaders.
Images, movies, and the live cameras can be used as sources, but if you wish to render this with OpenGL ES content behind your movie, I'd recommend rendering your OpenGL ES content to a texture-backed FBO and passing that texture in via a GPUImageTextureInput.
You could possibly use this to output a texture containing your movie frames with the keyed color replaced by a constant color with a 0 alpha channel, as well. This texture could be extracted using a GPUImageTextureOutput for later use in your OpenGL ES scene.
Apple showed a sample app at WWDC in 2011 called ChromaKey that shows how to handle frames of video passed to an OpenGL texture, manipulated, and optionally written out to a video file.
(In a very performant way)
It's written to use a feed from the video camera, and uses a very crude chromakey algorithm.
As the other poster said, you'll probably want to skip the chromakey code and do the color knockout yourself beforehand.
It shouldn't be that hard to rewrite the Chromakey sample app to use a video file as input instead of a camera feed, and it's quite easy to disable the chormakey code.
You'd need to modify the setup on the video input to expect RGBA data instead of RGB or Y/UV. The sample app is set up to use RGB, but I've seen other example apps from Apple that use Y/UV instead.
Have a look at the free "APNG" app on the app store. It shows how an animated PNG (.apng) can be rendered directly to an iOS view. The key is that APNG supports an alpha channel in the file format, so you don't need to mess around with chroma tricks that will not really work for all your video content. This approach is more efficient that multiple layers or chroma tricks since another round of processing is not needed each time a texture is displayed in a loop.
If you want to have a look at a small example xcode project that displays an alpha channel animation on the side of a spinning cube with OpenGL ES2, it can be found at Load OpenGL textures with alpha channel on iOS. The example code shows a simple call to glTexImage2D() that uploads a texture to the graphics card once for each display link callback.

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