Boost Quality and Performance of Media Applications with the Latest Intel HEVC Encoder/Decoder

by Terry Deem, product marketing engineer, Intel Developer Products Division 

Media and video application developers can tune for even more brilliant visual quality and fast performance with new HEVC technology inside the just released Intel® Media Server Studio Professional Edition (2017 R3). In this new edition, key analysis tools' enhancements provide better and deeper data insights on application performance characteristics so devs can save time targeting and fixing optimization areas. The Intel Media Server Professional Edition includes easy-to-use video encoding and decoding APIs, and visual quality and performance analysis tools that help media applications to deliver higher resolutions and frame rates.

What's New

For this release, Intel improved the visual quality of its HEVC encoder and decoder. Developers can optimize for subjective video quality gains of 10% by using Intel’s HEVC encoder combined with Intel® Processor Graphics (GPU). Developers can also optimize for subjective quality gains of 5% by using the software-only HEVC encoder. Other feature enhancements include:

• Improved compression efficiency for frequent Key Frames when using TU 1 / 2 encoding.
• Support for MaxFrameSize for constrained variable bitrate encoding, which results in better quality streaming.
• Advanced user-defined bitrate control. The software and GPU-accelerated HEVC encoders expose distortion metrics that can be used in concert with recently introduced external bitrate controls to support customized rate control for demanding customers.

Benchmark Source: Intel Corporation. See below for additional notes and disclaimers.¹

Optimize Performance and More with Super Component Tools Inside

Intel® VTune™ Amplifier

The Intel Media Server Studio Professional Edition includes several other tools that help developers understand their code and take advantage of the advanced Intel on-chip GPU. One of the more powerful analysis tools is Intel® VTune™ Amplifier. This tool allows for GPU in-kernel profiling, which helps developers quickly find memory latency of inefficient kernel algorithms. This analysis tool also provides a GPU Hotspots Summary view, which includes histograms of Packet Queue Depth and Packet Duration for analyzing DMA packet execution.

With Intel® VTune™ Amplifier, developers can also:

• Detect GPU stalled/idle issues to improve application performance.
• Find GPU hotspots for determining compute bound tasks hindered by GPU L3 bandwidth or DRAM bandwidth.

Intel® SDK for OpenCL™ Applications

Intel® SDK for OpenCL™ Applications (2017 version) is also included in this release of Intel Media Server Studio Professional Edition. This SDK adds OpenCL support for additional operating systems and platforms. It's fully compatible in Ubuntu* 16.04 with the latest OpenCL™ 2.0 CPU/GPU driver pages for Linux* OS (SRB5).  

About Intel Media Server Studio

Intel Media Server Studio allows video delivery and cloud graphics solution providers to quickly create, optimize and debug media applications, enable real-time video transcoding in media delivery, cloud gaming, remote desktop, and more solutions targeting the latest Intel® Xeon® and Intel® Core™ processor-based platforms.**

More Resources

• Learn more about Intel Media Server Studio
• Access documentation, solution articles, and other support resources 
• Connect with other experts and ask questions at the Intel Media SDK community forum
• To innovate and optimize client, mobile and IOT/embedded media/video applications and solutions, download Intel® Media SDK

Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. For more information go to http://www.intel.com/performance. Benchmark Source: Intel Corporation.

Optimization Notice: Intel’s compilers may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3 instruction sets and other optimizations. Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel. Microprocessor-dependent optimizations in this product are intended for use with Intel microprocessors. Certain optimizations not specific to Intel microarchitecture are reserved for Intel microprocessors. Please refer to the applicable product User and Reference Guides for more information regarding the specific instruction sets covered by this notice.  Notice revision #20110804. 

**Specific technical specifications apply. Review product site for more details.