Hardware acceleration on linux

[rolfinoz]

I feel like this is going to be something obvious and I am going to feel like an idiot for asking here, but....

I am new to ZM but it mostly makes sense. I am running a few h264 cameras on an old Thinkpad 440.
It as an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4300U CPU @ 1.90GHz

I experimented with using high resolution streams and linked streams and found that the best cpu load was from using the high resolution stream on passthrough recording, but with the resolution set low for detection.
That gives me a nice 4k recording but was using nearly 35% of a cpu for each zmc process.

I set the decoder name to vaapi and set the path to the local device under the source options for the camera.

The cpu load dropped to around 8% per stream so FFMPEG is now using the hardware acceleration, great.

But as soon as I log out of the desktop on the machine the cpu usage jumps back up to 35% per stream.

It looks like the video acceleration is linked to the Xserver, but I can't figure out how.

Does anyone know how to keep the video acceleration running the whole time?

[rolfinoz]

After some investigating I found that it was nothing to do with the acceleration.

Vaapi was working correctly.

But on logging in the system was put into the performance power state and this drops the cpu usage that much!

I can set the powerstate from the command line when not logged in and it has the same effect.

echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

This has dropped the system load average down from over 1 to about .3 with 3 4K streams.