NVIDIA

H.264 vs H.265 vs AV1 end-to-end latency on Jetson Orin — grouped bar chart

H.264, H.265, and AV1 on Jetson Orin: A Real Hardware Latency Benchmark

A rigorous per-stage latency benchmark across H.264, H.265, and AV1 hardware codecs on NVIDIA Jetson Orin (JetPack 6), measuring encode, wire, and decode separately at FHD and HD resolutions. AV1 wins end-to-end at 104 ms FHD / 86 ms HD. H.264 is the worst choice despite being the oldest: its nvv4l2decoder holds ~4 frames in an internal DPB buffer, adding 130–170 ms of hidden latency. Wire latency is governed by parse-element lookahead, not byte volume. Clock sync achieves ±234 µs via chrony. Full pipeline source, CSVs, and reproduction steps included.

Cross-process zero-copy NVMM IPC on Jetson — dma-buf fd passing, NvBufSurfaceImport, lock-free pool

Cross-Process Zero-Copy on Jetson: dma-buf fds, NvBufSurfaceImport, and a Cache-Line-Padded Pool

Two processes on a Jetson, one camera frame in NVMM (GPU memory), no copies. The kernel does the heavy lifting via dma-buf fds; SCM_RIGHTS carries the fd across the process boundary; NvBufSurfaceImport reconstructs the surface on the consumer side; a cache-line-padded ring of atomic ref-counts keeps fan-out coherent without locks. With benchmark numbers and a Godbolt-runnable demo of the SCM_RIGHTS pattern.

Zero-Copy Video on Jetson: Building gst-nvmm-cpp and Contributing to GStreamer

How we built a GStreamer plugin suite for zero-copy NVMM video on NVIDIA Jetson, the bugs we hit along the way, and what it takes to contribute to the GStreamer project — from filing issues to getting an MR merged.