Requirements

LiveCompositor imposes certain requirements both in the runtime and during a build. Specifics might differ depending on the way you use the compositor and features you are requiring.

WebGPU features

If a feature is not supported then compositor server will fail on startup.

Always required:

• TEXTURE_BINDING_ARRAY
• PUSH_CONSTANTS

Enabled by default:

• SAMPLED_TEXTURE_AND_STORAGE_BUFFER_ARRAY_NON_UNIFORM_INDEXING
• UNIFORM_BUFFER_AND_STORAGE_TEXTURE_ARRAY_NON_UNIFORM_INDEXING

Those options are enabled by default, but can be disabled using LIVE_COMPOSITOR_REQUIRED_WGPU_FEATURES environment variable.

note

All of the above features should be available on almost any GPU. If you are getting an error about unsupported features, then most likely, the issue is caused by missing or too old drivers.

Hardware requirements

Supported platforms:

• Linux - x86_64
  • It should work with any GPU from hardware perspective. Even though very unlikely, it is possible that some GPUs might not have drivers that implement all the required features.
• macOS - Apple Silicon

Other platforms are not regularly tested, but compositor should also work on:

• Linux - aarch64 (Note that by default docker on Apple Silicon macOS is running aarch64 Linux)
• macOS - x86_64

Software requirements

Dockerfile

Dockerfile defines all software requirements. Configurations provided in the compositor repo are written to work with both GPU and CPU based rendering. To use them in your own project, just copy the Dockerfile and replace COPY . /root/project with an appropriate RUN git clone ... command.

If you want to use a different distro or different Ubuntu version then consult the building from source section.

Binaries from GitHub releases

For Linux:

• FFmpeg 6
• glibc 2.35 or higher (version used by Ubuntu 22.04)
• MESA (e.g. mesa-vulkan-drivers package on Ubuntu)
  • 23.2.1 or higher for CPU based rendering
  • For GPU based rendering the lowest version we tested was 22.0.1, but older version might also work.

For macOS:

• FFmpeg 7 (this version will mostly follow a default version available in Homebrew)

note

Changing FFmpeg version on macOS might be troublesome, so we decided to produce binaries that will be easiest to use for most users, even if this means updating FFmpeg version in a minor or patch release. Changes like that might be considered unsafe, but in case of LiveCompositor macOS platform will be used mostly for development, and it is highly unlikely to be used for a production deployment.

Building from source

• FFmpeg 6 or higher. Build time version has to be the same as runtime version.
• Rust toolchain.
• Following libraries (for build time you will need version with header files if your distro ships them separately):
  • FFmpeg dependencies: libavcodec, libavformat, libavfilter, libavdevice, libavutil, libswscale, libswresample
  • libopus
  • libssl

Linux specific (with a Vulkan backend):

• MESA
  • 23.2.1 or higher for CPU based rendering
  • For GPU based rendering the lowest version we tested was 22.0.1, but older version might also work.
  • e.g. for Ubuntu
    • build time: apt-get install libegl1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dri libxcb-xfixes0-dev
    • runtime: apt-get install mesa-vulkan-drivers

Nix

LiveCompositor repository includes a nix flake, but because compositor is highly dependent on hardware and available drivers this configuration might not be self-contained/portable as nix configuration are expected to be in general.

This configuration is primary used for development, and it is not recommended unless you know what you are doing.