Intel VA-API Driver Gets H.264 Encoding Improvements For Broadwell

[TheLexMachine]

I'm just wondering if theres going to be a new mPCIe DSP for VP9/h.265 like the Broadcom CrystalHD was for h.264 decoding upgrades to low end gear. I've got some Athlon and E series systems that could use it to stay completely relevant for their tasks for years to come.

I doubt they would since decoding will be built into all the low-end GPUs and by the time either codec takes hold, such low-end gear will be too low-end or their GPUs unsupported by current Linux distros of the time.

[Kivada]

I doubt they would since decoding will be built into all the low-end GPUs and by the time either codec takes hold, such low-end gear will be too low-end or their GPUs unsupported by current Linux distros of the time.

You really think that they'd drop support for OpenGL 3.0-4.0 class GPUs in the next few years? We still support OpenGL2.0 class hardware and even some of the OpenGL1.4 era hardware.

[TheLexMachine]

What I meant to say is that they wouldn't do it because there's no reason for Broadcom to make that product as the low-end GPUs that will be out from 2016 and onwards will already have the decoding capabilities and the low-end gear you have from years ago that you want them to make a product for will not likely run well, if at all, on the newer distros of the time because the hardware won't really be supported with the latest distros due to lack of driver updates. Things are already in the shitter for a lot of that older hardware that may be several years old by now, especially if it's AMD hardware or those Intel Atom boards or older Nvidia GPUs from 2005-2010.

[smitty3268]

Not true, Netflix's 4k streams utilize H.265.

http://www.dailytech.com/Netflix+to+...ticle33962.htm

Have they actually started doing that, though, or did they just announce plans to start doing it soon?

[Kivada]

What I meant to say is that they wouldn't do it because there's no reason for Broadcom to make that product as the low-end GPUs that will be out from 2016 and onwards will already have the decoding capabilities and the low-end gear you have from years ago that you want them to make a product for will not likely run well, if at all, on the newer distros of the time because the hardware won't really be supported with the latest distros due to lack of driver updates. Things are already in the shitter for a lot of that older hardware that may be several years old by now, especially if it's AMD hardware or those Intel Atom boards or older Nvidia GPUs from 2005-2010.

I don't think you have much experience with older hardware or with adding in hardware DSPs. You can take the slowest first gen Atoms which can barely handle DVD playback, toss in a CrystalHD and they can suddenly play 1080p content in h.264 like they where top end hardware. All that matters for these chips is that the PCIe bus fast enough to get the content through(mPCIe 1.0 is still 250 MB/s), the DSP does all of the heavy lifting.

Old hardware not having decent drivers on Linux? Only on Intel it seems, I've got old Radeon x1250 boxes still running the latest and greatest distros, same goes for my HD3650, my old Geforce 8800GTS and socket 939 Athlon64 3500+ can still play the majority of games on Linux from Steam, I was even going to dust off that old box and see if Civ5 would run on it.

[deanjo]

Have they actually started doing that, though, or did they just announce plans to start doing it soon?

They are already doing it. The selection is small to start with but Breaking Bad and House of Cards are already being broadcast at 4k.

http://blog.netflix.com/2014/05/netflix-now-streaming-in-ultra-hd-4k.html

[madbiologist]

support for MADI on Sandy Bridge

In case anybody is wondering, MADI stands for motion-adaptive deinterlacing. It is a video post-processing feature. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinter...tion_detection for more information.

[mikkl]

There's no chance of getting h265 encoding in broadwell. I doubt it will even be available in skylake.

Skylake integrated video encoder/decoder will be enhanced, and it will support new codec types. The hardware decoder will work with JPEG, JMPEG, MPEG2, VC1, WMV9, AVC, H264, VP8 and HEVC/H265 video and image formats. The encoder will be support JPEG, MPEG2, AVC, H264, VP8 and HEVC/H265 standards. It is possible that Intel will add support for encoding/decoding of VP9 video. There will be new video filters as well.

http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2014/2014060901_Some_features_of_Skylake_graphics_architecture.html

[watchbeans]

H.265 decoding isn't coming until Skylake with hardware encoding several years away and all 4K content is currently encoded with H.264, so it's far less relevant at this point and will be so for at least another several years while VP9 and H.265 mature.

Thank you for sharing.

[Pallidus]

if you are stuck with gen4 no h264 vaapi for you

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libva-driver-intel-g45-h264/