New Features for Amazon AppStream – YUV444 Color and Logging

You can use AppStream to build complex applications that run from simple devices, unconstrained by the compute power, storage, or graphical rendering capabilities of the device. Your application can take advantage of the new and powerful g2 instance type, including high-performance GPU-powered rendering of 2D and 3D graphics. To learn more about AppStream, see my recent blog post, Amazon AppStream Now Available to All Developers.

Today we are making AppSteam better and more powerful with the addition of support for YUV444 color and application logging. Let’s take a look at both of these important new features.

YUV444 Color
As is the case with many seemingly simple endeavors, representing colors in digital form turns out to be surprisingly complicated in practice. Space utilization, compressibility, applicability to various types of scenes and images, efficiency with respect to encoding and decoding, picture clarity, and color fidelity all come in to play.

Amazon AppStream was launched with support for YUV420 color encoding. This format is highly compressible and is a very good match for applications that need to display images that feature continuous color, such as a color photo of a landscape.

In order to make AppStream an even better fit for applications that need to display images that feature a stark contrast between colors, you can now opt to use YUV444 encoding for your application. This encoding is a great fit for CAD (Computer Aided Design) applications and other apps that need to display drawings or wireframes. This encoding generates more bits per frame, and will require more bandwidth than YUV420.

Here are the most representative portions of image with crisp wireframe-like colors, encoded with YUV420 and YUV444:

YUV 420

YUV 444

You can opt for YUV444 encoding in your application by calling the XStxServerAddChromaSampling function as described in the Stream Video to a Client documentation.

Application Logging
You can now enable log collection for your streaming application from within the AWS Management Console:

AppStream will collect multiple types of logs pertaining to each streaming session, bundle them up as a ZIP file, and post them to one of your S3 buckets at the conclusion of the session. The following types of log files will be included:

• Logs generated by the application in directories that you designate.
• Standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr) streams.
• Windows mini dumps (if the application crashed).
• CPU, Memory, and Disk Consumption logs.

These new features are available now and you can start using them today!

— Jeff;