Speed Video & Image Processing with New Intel® Media SDK
Just released, Intel updated its media software development tools, Intel® Media Server Studio and Intel® Media SDK 2018 R1, which are used to optimize video solutions from camera to cloud, with new features that help developers increase performance and quality for AVC and HEVC video transcoding, streaming, and video/image processing.
This article focuses on What’s New in the Intel Media SDK for Windows* 2018. Significant features were added to this SDK, including media codecs, HEVC components, a video quality tool, and more - all for FREE! (Previously these features were available only with a paid license.) Support for data center, visual cloud, broadcasting services running on Intel® processor-based servers was also added, along with current desktop and mobile platform support. This SDK provides significant value to developers creating media and video applications in a world where more and more content is fast moving to video formats.
Download the SDK Free: Windows*
What's New in Intel® Media SDK for Windows 2018 R1
In this release, significant new features were added to the Media SDK for Windows, which expands its usages to include enterprise, data center/visual cloud, broadcasting—along with desktop, client and mobile. New features and capabilities include:
- Encoding features from Intel Media Server Studio Professional Edition now FREE.
- HEVC codec components - Software and GPU-accelerated HEVC (H.265)
- Video Quality Caliper – This analysis tool provides efficient sequence-level inspection of the quality of encoded or decoded video streams, objective metrics such as PSNR and SSIM, and the ability for subjective inspection by allowing an interactive graphical interface.
- Video Processing features
- Chroma siting – This video processing feature allows the flexible position of the chroma sample relative to the luma sample.
- Field weaving supports deinterlacing to weave the fields of the input stream.
- Delta QP allows higher encoding quality at the region of interest (ROI) and provides more flexibility for bitrate control.
- Encoding units information supports the AVC (H.264) encoder to add the NALU information, to help improve CPU usage during recording in camera applications
- HEVC HMFT support SEI message for HDR – Allows for transferring color space information in SEI messages.
- AVC: Supports weighted predictions for P-frames & B-frames
- HEVC: Provides max frame size bitrate control
- Preview of Adaptive Long Term Reference(LTR): An intelligent encoding feature which significantly improves compression efficiency and video quality for video conference, surveillance and certain graphics/game streaming applications.
- Preview features for Cannon Lake
- Improved HEVC encode video quality: Enabled Sample Adaptive Offset (SAO) controls, multiple Largest Coding Unit (LCU) Size to choose the luma LCU size, and Transform Skipping.
- NEW VP9 encoder features: Enabled Segmentation controls and Temporal Layer configuration, and added external VP9 parameter controls
Get Priority Support, Additional Tools to Optimize and Analyze Performance
Take advantage of Priority Support. Access these other tools commonly used to optimize enterprise/visual cloud video solutions.
- Priority Support – Get direct, confidential access to Intel engineers for help with technical questions with a license that includes Priority Support.
- Intel® VTune™ Amplifier is a performance profiler ideal for tuning media applications It gathers a rich set of CPU, GPU, threading, OpenCL, and bandwidth metrics needed to find media processing bottlenecks, and provides tools to quickly analyze and interpret data. Sort and filter the results and then display them for easy analysis on the timeline, the code source, and on a GPU architecture diagram that shows VDBox, VEBox, EU utilization, and bus bandwidth. Get faster code faster with extensive performance metrics and powerful analysis tools.
Download Free Trial or Purchase - Intel® SDK for OpenCL™ Applications (Linux* and Windows*) assists with creating, building, debugging, and analyzing OpenCL applications for the underlying architecture while providing in-depth analysis with visualization and interactive mode, which is extremely useful for optimization.
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