Video GPU vendors (AMD, Intel, NVIDIA) ship their hardware with drivers, which in turn provide hardware-assisted decoder for JPEG (also known as MJPG and MJPEG. and Motion JPEG) video in form-factor of a Media Foundation Transform (MFT).
JPEG is not included in DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) 2.0 specification, however hardware carries implementation for the decoder. A separate additional MFT is a natural way to provide OS integration.
Hardware MFTs must use the new asynchronous processing model…
Presumably the MFT has the behavior of normal asynchronous MFT, however as long as this markup does not have side effects with Microsoft’s software, AMD does not care for this confusion to others.
Furthermore, the registration information for this decoder suggests that it can handle decoding into MFVideoFormat_NV12 video format, and sadly it is again inaccurate promise. Despite the supposed claim, the capability is missing and Microsoft’s Video Processor MFT jumps in as needed to satisfy such format conversion.
These were just minor things, more or less easy to tolerate. However, a rule of thumb is that Media Foundation glue layer provided by technology partners such as GPU vendors is only satisfying minimal certification requirements, and beyond that it causes suffering and pain to anyone who wants to use it in real world scenarios.
AMD’s take on making developers feel miserable is the way how hardware-assisted JPEG decoding actually takes place.
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For whatever reason they create a thread for every processed video frame or close to this… Resource utilization and performance is affected respectively. Imagine you are processing a video feed from high frame rate camera? The decoder itself, including its AMF runtime overhead, decodes images in a millisecond or less but they spoiled it with absurd threading topped with other bugs.
However, AMD video cards still have the hardware implementation of the codec, and this capability is also exposed via their AMF SDK.
AMFVideoDecoderUVD_MJPEG Acceleration Type: AMF_ACCEL_HARDWARE AMF_VIDEO_DECODER_CAP_NUM_OF_STREAMS: 16 CodecId AMF_VARIANT_INT64 7 DPBSize AMF_VARIANT_INT64 1 NumOfStreams AMF_VARIANT_INT64 16 Input Width Range: 32 - 7,680 Height Range: 32 - 4,320 Vertical Alignment: 32 Format Count: 0 Memory Type Count: 1 Memory Type: AMF_MEMORY_HOST Native Interlace Support: 1 Output Width Range: 32 - 7,680 Height Range: 32 - 4,320 Vertical Alignment: 32 Format Count: 4 Format: AMF_SURFACE_YUY2 Format: AMF_SURFACE_NV12 Native Format: AMF_SURFACE_BGRA Format: AMF_SURFACE_RGBA Memory Type Count: 1 Memory Type: AMF_MEMORY_DX11 Native Interlace Support: 1
I guess they stop harassing developers once they switch from out of the box MFT to SDK interface into their decoder. “AMD MFT MJPEG Decoder” is highly likely just a wrapper over AMF interface, however my guess is that the problematic part is exactly the abandoned wrapper and not the core functionality.