Intel Media Driver Q4-19 Brings Tiger Lake, Jasper Lake, Better Encode/Decode

Quietly released over the holidays was Intel's quarterly update to the Intel Media Driver that serves as their modern open-source GPU-accelerated video encode/decode solution for Linux systems.

This "Intel Media Driver" is their new VA-API solution they began back in 2017 to succeed their earlier Intel VA-API Linux drivers. The open-source Media Driver still uses the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) and remains focused on Broadwell through Ice Lake and now Tiger Lake / Jasper Lake / Elkhart Lake graphics hardware.

With the Intel Media Driver Q4'19 release they have that Tiger Lake / Jasper Lake / Elkhart Lake support in place. Additionally, there is support for building this driver with Clang 8, compressed surface creation support, various video processing enhancements, BRC visual quality improvements for encode, and various other encode/decode improvements.

More details on this quarterly updated Intel Media Driver for Linux via GitHub. The documentation outlines the current state of the encode/decode features of Broadwell through now Tiger Lake.

In related news and reminding me about the holiday Q4-19 release, Debian has now picked up the Intel Media Driver "iHD" along with the latest libva and GStreamer VA-API bits.