Device Load and Software Transcoding Instance

At system run time, device firmware maintains a value for each hardware codec representing the processing load currently on the codec. This number is obtained by accumulating clock cycles spent decoding, encoding, and filtering streams and dividing it by the maximum number of cycles available during a period of time. This reflects how heavy the codec is being used for the stream processing. This is called the real load.

For each stream being decoded or encoded, a software decoding or encoding instance is created on the hardware codec. The number of active software transcoding instances on a hardware instance is another measure of load on transcoding resources.

The firmware also tracks the model load for each card. The model load is calculated by width*height*FPS. The model load will be increased from the firmware side once an instance is created successfully, either for encoder or decoder. When an instance is closed successfully the model load will be deducted as well.