Intel® Media Software Development Kit v2.0 Gold Release Notes

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December 26, 2010 11:00 PM PST


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Download Intel® Media Software Development Kit v2.0 Gold Release Notes [PDF 219KB]

Overview

The Intel® Media Software Development Kit (Intel® Media SDK) is a software development library that exposes the media acceleration capabilities of Intel platforms for decoding, encoding and video preprocessing. The API library covers a wide range of Intel platforms. The Intel Media SDK targets general application developers who want to integrate encoding and decoding into their applications.

Please see the "<install-folder>\doc\MediaSDK Sample Guide.rtf" for information on sample source code provided with this SDK.


New Features

This Intel® Media SDK v2.0 Gold Release introduces additional changes to API version 1.1. This version is backwards compatible with API version 1.0. API version 1.1 includes the use of multiple sessions and an API extension that allows user-defined functions into the SDK processing pipeline. For more information on multiple sessions and the API, please see "<install-folder>\doc\mediasdk-man.pdf." For information on the USER class, please see "<install-folder>\doc\mediasdkusr-man.pdf."

This release includes the following changes to API version 1.1:

  • AsyncDepth parameter was added to mfxVideoParam structure. See the Intel® Media SDK Reference manual ("doc\mediasdk-man.pdf") for details.
  • Extended buffer type MFX_EXTBUFF_PAVP_OPTION was removed.
  • FrameType enumerator was extended to support field pairs of different types. See the Intel® Media SDK Reference manual for details.
  • Support of extended picture structure was added to the Intel® Media SDK. To maintain backwards compatibility, the additional parameter mfxInfoMFX::ExtendedPicStruct was added. When mfxInfoMFX::ExtendedPicStruct is set to zero (default value), the decoder operates in compatibility mode and only outputs the base picture structure. If it is set to 1, the decoder outputs the extended picture structure. See "doc\mediasdk-man.pdf" for details.

System Requirements

Hardware
  • IA-32 or Intel® 64 architecture processors with the Intel® Core™ processor or later is required for this Developer's release.
  • 200 MB free hard disk space for this release.
  • The software implementation DLLs, libmfxsw32.dll and libmfxsw64.dll, requires compatible IA-32 or Intel® 64 architecture processor with support for Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 instructions.
Software

Package Contents

Note: The suffix <arch> indicates 32- or 64-bit Microsoft* Windows* (either "win32" or "x64"). Both are always installed to allow for cross-platform development.

<install-folder> Intel® Media SDK Release Notes (this file) and End User License Agreement (EULA) "MediaSDK Pre-release EULA.rtf"
><install-folder>\ bin\<arch> Intel Media SDK Dynamic Library and pre-built binaries of installed sample applications:
  • SDK software implementation DLLs:
    libmfxsw32.dll for IA-32 architecture
    libmfxsw64.dll for Intel® 64 architecture
  • If installed, console sample application binaries:
    sample_encode.exe
    sample_decode.exe
    sample_vpp.exe
    sample_multi_transcode.exe
  • If installed, Microsoft DirectShow sample binary application
    sample_dshow.exe
  • If installed, Microsoft DirectShow filters
    h264_dec_filter.dll
    h264_enc_filter.dll
    mpeg2_dec_filter.dll
    mpeg2_enc_filter.dll
    vc1_dec_filter.dll
    imc_*.dll
<install-folder>\doc Intel Media SDK documentation:
  • Intel Media SDK Reference Manual
    mediasdk-man.pdf
  • Intel Media SDK Extensions for User-Defined Functions
    mediasdkusr-man.pdf
  • Microsoft* DirectShow* Filter Interfaces and Specifications
    MediaSDK Filters Specifications.pdf
  • Samples Overview
    MediaSDK Sample Guide.rtf
<install-folder>\doc (continued)
  • Intel Media SDK Library Distribution and Dispatching Process
    mediasdk-distrib.rtf
<install-folder>\ include
  • External Intel Media SDK headers:
  • Type definitions in mfxdefs.h
  • Structure definitions in mfxstructures.h
  • Function definitions in C in mfxvideo.h
  • C++ wrapper of the SDK functions in mfxvideo++.h
  • Extensions for User-Defined Functions mfxplugin.h
<install-folder>\lib\<arch> Static Dispatcher Library libmfx.lib
<install-folder>\ samples\
  • Contains the following source code samples:
  • Intel Media SDK Encoding Sample in folder sample_encode
  • Intel Media SDK Decoding Sample in folder sample_decode
  • Intel Media SDK Transcoding Sample in folder sample_multi_transcode
  • Intel Media SDK Video Preprocessing Sample in folder sample_vpp
  • Intel Media SDK Application Sample using Microsoft DirectShow in folder sample_dshow
  • Intel Media SDK Plug-Ins Sample using Microsoft DirectShow in folder sample_plugins\dshow
  • Intel Media SDK Application Sample using Microsoft Multimedia Framework Plug-ins in folder sample_studio
For use only with Microsoft Windows 7 Operating System:
  • Intel Media SDK Plug-Ins Sample using Microsoft Media Foundation in folder sample_plugins\mfoundation


Installation

  1. Installation requires full administrative rights.
  2. Extract files from the .ZIP file to the target hard drive.
  3. Select the installer that matches the target system architecture:
File Name for Installer Target System Architecture
Intel(R)_Media_SDK_win32.msi IA-32 architecture running Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7 Operating System
Intel(R)_Media_SDK_x64.msi Intel® 64 architecture running Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7 64-bit Operating System

Note: If win32 is installed, the x64 lib and bin files are also present to enable cross-platform development and vice versa.


Known Limitations

The Intel® Media SDK Library has the following known limitations:

  • A remote connection to the computer in windowless mode results in an inability to create a valid Direct3D* device, thus precluding the usage of Direct3D9* surfaces. See "doc\mediasdk-man.pdf" for details.
  • The Intel Media SDK dispatcher is best used with a standard DLL entry point (as recommended by Microsoft) when used in a DLL application such as a Microsoft DirectShow filter. The DLL entry point setting can be found under the Link > Advanced compiler options. Non-standard entry points can be used, but are not recommended.
  • Decoders in v2.0 have been optimized to improve transcoding performance as compared to v1.5 transcoding. However, when using v2.0 decoders stand-alone, the performance may be slightly slower than in v1.5.
  • H.264 encoder on the x64 platform is known to be slower than the same encoder on the win32 platform.
  • H.264 encoder is slower than it was in Intel Media SDK v1.5 (Gold) when TargetUsage==1 (BEST_QUALITY) and mfxInfoMFX::NumSlice exceeds the number of logical processors.
  • H.264 encoder does not support the SPSPPSExtCodingOption buffer in MFXVideoENCODE_QueryIOSurf, MFXVideoENCODE_Reset or MFXVideoENCODE_Query.
  • MPEG-2 encoder shows slightly worse performance than v1.5 during interlaced (field) encoding of CIF or smaller resolution streams.
  • The MPEG-2 encoder doesn't check mfxVideoParam::mfxInfoMFX::CodecProfile and mfxVideoParam::mfxInfoMFX::CodecLevel for consistency against other initialization parameters. So the output stream always has CodecProfile and CodecLevel that were set initially, no matter how other initialization parameters (resolution, frame rate, data rate) were initialized.
  • If the MPEG-2 encoder mfxVideoParam::mfxInfoMFX::CodecProfile is initialized to 0, then the stream will be encoded as MFX_PROFILE_MPEG2_MAIN. Additionally if the MPEG-2 encoder mfxVideoParam::mfxInfoMFX::CodecLevel is initialized to 0, then the stream will be encoded as MFX_LEVEL_MPEG2_MAIN.
  • The MPEG-2 encoder implementation of mfxVideoParam::mfxInfoMFX::IdrInterval doesn't match its description in the "doc\ mediasdk-man.pdf". If mfxVideoParam::mfxInfoMFX::IdrInterval = N, then the MPEG-2 encoder inserts a sequence header before every Nth I-frame. And if mfxVideoParam::mfxInfoMFX::IdrInterval = 0, then the MPEG-2 encoder inserts a sequence header once.
  • When asynchronously decoding MPEG-2 streams with frames output in decoded order, visual artifacts may occur in some rare cases.
  • MPEG-2 decoder does not correct out of range motion vectors, which can cause picture boundary artifacts.
  • Transcoding from MPEG-2 content shows lower performance than v1.5 because of a bug fix regarding incorrect MPEG-2 mfxInfoMFX:: mfxFrameInfo ::PicStruct processing that occurred in v1.5.
  • MPEG-2 decoder may produce first frame with visible artifacts after reposition.
  • Transcoding from VC-1 to any format may produce slightly different results when done more than once. This may occur if an input VC-1 stream uses "skipped frames." For more information on skipped frames, see the VC-1 specification.
  • USER module C++ wrapper is missing. Please see Sample_encoder source code as it implements the partial C++ wrapper.
  • Disable the Microsoft* compiler's Whole Program Optimization (/GL) key to build the application with the Static Dispatcher Library (libmfx.lib)

Other Limitations

  • Limitations related to source code samples are discussed in their corresponding readme files. See "<install-folder>\doc\MediaSDK Sample Guide.rtf" for an overview of the samples and additional documentation.