Intel Media SDK 20.5.1 Released

At the start of Q4, Intel released Media SDK 20.3 with AV1 accelerated decode, Rocket Lake, DG1/SG1 discrete GPU support, and other improvements. Now to end out the quarter is a new release coming in at version 20.5.1.

The Intel Media SDK is their API for offering video decode/encode on Intel Gen HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics. From HEVC through VP9 and now AV1 with the very latest hardware, Intel has been investing in this modern media software development kit as part of their Xe Graphics play and ensuring this C API will work well in the data center too and just not desktop/laptop systems. The Intel Media SDK in turn can be utilized by the likes of FFmpeg and GStreamer as well as various Intel software packages like the OpenVINO toolkit. The Media SDK also exposes VA-API support as one of the means for Intel video acceleration.

Intel Media SDK 20.5.1 is the new version just released today to succeed the former Media SDK 20.3.0. This new release has a number of AVC encode low-level improvements, refactored handling of errors in frame submission for the AV1 decoding, TCBRC support for HEVC encode, updated code samples, support for dynamic GPU session priority, and a number of other low-level changes.

This open-source Intel Media SDK can be downloaded from GitHub.