Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2023Q1 Brings Improved Multi-GPU Video Acceleration Support

Intel's open-source "cartwheel-ffmpeg" project is their repository where they collect all of their FFmpeg patches prior to upstreaming. While the patches have been available in Git form, prior to the weekend Intel released their 2023Q1 queue of patches to this widely-used, open-source multimedia library.

The Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2023Q1 collection is their current queue of patches yet to be upstreamed into FFmpeg proper. The focus on Intel's FFmpeg patchwork is for having the latest VA-API and QSV video acceleration support for use on Intel graphics platforms from Gen9 Kaby Lake era integrated graphics through Raptor Lake on the CPU side while also supporting Intel DG2/Alchemist across both the consumer Arc Graphics as well as data center GPU products.

Since the prior FFmpeg Cartwheel 2022Q4, Intel's FFmpeg patch magic added hstack_qsv/vstack_qsv/xstack_qsv filter support for both the QSV and VA-API back-ends, GOPCONCAT BSF support, and support for RGB* format clips for VP9 video decoding.

The GOPCONCAT BSF support for Intel QSV and VA-API is interesting as this new FFmpeg filter will allow combining different streams to create a new stream and is part of Intel's effort for helping the video encoders run on multi-GPU systems/servers.

"One use case is that in multi device hardware transcode, general transcode will use same hardware both in decoding and encoding. Then the left device will not be used. Now we can use [different] hardware for transcode and select different frames to encode. And re-connect the output from encoding by using gop concat."

More details on the Intel FFmpeg 2023Q1 patch cartwheel via the GitHub release page.