AMD Advanced Media Acceleration "AMA" 1.0 SDK Released

AMD has published the Advanced Media Acceleration (AMA) v1.0 SDK as a software stack aimed for hardware video acceleration and capable of high density real-time transcoding. The AMD AMA SDK integrates with the likes of the open-source FFmpeg and GStreamer projects for fitting nicely in the Linux software ecosystem as well as sporting its own C-based API.

This AMD AMA SDK isn't yet-another software effort for video acceleration with AMD graphics cards, at least for now but rather currently just supports the AMD Alveo video accelerator cards, IP based on their acquisition from Xilinx. AMD's new Alveo MA35D media accelerator paired with the AMD AMA SDK v1.0 allows for complete video pipeline acceleration. The SDK can handle up to four 4K@60 H.264 / H.265 / AV1 streams and four 4K@60 AV1 YUV420p encodes or transcodes per card. There is also an ultra-low latency mode available and various other options.

AMD announced on Thursday that the AMD Alveo MA35D media accelerator card is in production and christened it with the release of the AMD AMA SDK 1.0.

More details on the AMD AMA SDK are available from GitHub documentation. While AMD says the SDK is available on GitHub, so far in the amd/ama-sdk repository is just a set of HTML files for the documentation without any SDK source code.