MediaSDK

By Eric Sardella (Intel) (14 posts) on August 14, 2009 at 10:08 am

Hi All,

Its been a while since I had the opportunity to sit down and get a message out to everyone. Its been a heck of a summer. On the personal side, I've been building a house for the last 8 months and its finally done enough to move in. I have a new appreciation for air conditioning. Nor Cal 105 degree summers were melting my keyboards.

So, Fall is approaching and its time to dive back into media development. I finally get to tell everyone about the new Intel MediaSDK! If you didn’t see it, at SIGGRAPH last week Intel announced the new SDK and made the beta available here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/media/
This API is designed to take the complexity out of both accelerating video playback and eventually encode on all Intel hardware going forward. It's divided into basically three super classes - DECODE, ENCODE, and VPP (Video Pre-processing) and will utilize the GPU via DXVA2 if possible:

Features Supported

Codecs Decode: MPEG-2, VC1 and AVC/H.264
Encode: MPEG-2 and AVC/H.264
Pre-Processing Inverse Telecine, Scene Detection, Deinterlacing, Denoising,
Resizing and Color conversion
MPEG-2 Profiles Simple, Main, and High
VC1 Profiles Simple, Main, and Advanced
AVC Profiles Baseline (enc only), Main, and High

Frame Types

 Progressive and Interlaced
Color Format NV12 (4:2:0)
Rate Control CBR and VBR

The Beta supports full decode acceleration of H.264 and VC1 on the Intel G45 based platforms, the rest of the functions use CPU (in an optimized way) to get the work done. Going forward, the API will be supported on all future graphics platforms, and I think this will be the only way to accelerate encode. So get it working now and it will work on both IIG and future discrete cards. Because at its core, the SDK utilizes DXVA2 - its designed for Windows Vista 32 & 64 bit OS'.

The Beta also comes with a good set of sample code to learn from - including command line and DirectShow filters for encode, decode, and pixel processing. To learn the API, I took the samples and expanded them - then put them into Media Player Classic. In a short time, I was accelerating VC1 and h.264 - it was VERY cool. I'll be talking more about this exercise in a future post.

I am moderating the MediaSDK forum at: http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-media-sdk/. Drop by and tell us what you think.

On another subject, I am happy to say that the long standing issue accelerating h.264 with MPC on the G45 has been fixed. I've communicated the changes back to the project. I am now starting to look at VC1 and I'll posting updates on this blog as I get closer.

Thanks for reading!

Eric

Categories: Graphics & Media
Tags: , , , ,

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Comments (2)

August 31, 2009 2:07 PM PDT


Clarkdale Graphics		 Does the DXVA2 code in MPC-HC supports the Clarkdale GPU with its Clearvideo decoder or will it need to be updated to support Clarkdale?

http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/9144/clarkdale.jpg
September 6, 2009 12:53 PM PDT


andy vt		 Any chance you can provide your patches to the MPC-HC decoder?

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