Intel has a multitude of awesome software development tools, including ones for innovating and optimizing media applications, immersive video including 360° and virtual reality, graphics, integrating visual understanding, and more. But sometimes, it's hard to figure out just which development tool or tools are best for your particular needs and usages.
Below you'll find a few insights to help you get to the right Intel software tool faster for media and video solutions, so you can focus on the really fun stuff - like building new competitive products and solutions, improving media application performance or video streaming quality for devices from edge to cloud, or even transitioning to more efficient formats like HEVC.
Intel® Media SDK
Developing for:
- Intel® Core™ or Intel® Core™ M processors
- Select SKUs of Intel® Celeron™, Intel® Pentium® and Intel® Atom® processors with Intel® HD Graphics supporting Intel® Quick Sync Video
- Client, mobile and embedded devices - desktop or mobile media applications
- OS - Windows* and Embedded Linux*
- An Open Source version is also available at Github under the MIT license
Uses & Needs
- Fast video playback, encode, processing, media formats conversion or video conferencing
- Accelerated processing of RAW video or images
- Screen capture
- Audio decode & encode support
- Used with smart cameras across drones, phones, editors/players, network video recorders, and connected cars
- Supports HEVC, AVC, MPEG-2 and audio codecs
Three editions are available:
FREE Community
Essentials
Professional
Developing for:
- Select Intel® Xeon® or Intel® Core™ processor-based platforms
- Servers/Desktop, Cloud / Data center / Embedded
- Applications for media, communications infrastructure (video processing, streaming and conferencing; digital surveillance), video cloud & data center
- OS - Linux* or both Linux and Microsoft Windows*
Format Support - HEVC, AVC, MPEG-2 and MPEG-Audio
Uses & Needs
- High-density and fast video decode, encode, transcode
- Optimize performance of Media/GPU pipeline
- Enhanced graphics programmability or visual analytics (for use with OpenCL™ applications)
- Low-level control over encode quality
- Debug, analysis and performance/quality optimization tools
- Speed ransition to real-time 4K HEVC
- Need to measure visual quality (Video Quality Caliper)
- Looking for an enterprise-grade telecine interlace reverser (Premium Telecine Interlace Reverser)
- Audio codecs
- Screen capture
Free Download & Paid Edition Options
Intel® Collaboration Suite for WebRTC
This Client SDK builds on top of the W3C standard WebRTC APIs to accelerate development of real-time communications (RTC), including broadcast, peer-to-peer, conference mode communications, and online gaming/VR streaming.
Use with Andrioid*, web (JavaScript* built), iOS* and Windows* applications.
Intel® SDK for OpenCL™ Applications
Developing for:
General purpose GPU acceleration on select Intel® processors (see technical specifications). OpenCL primarily targets execution units. An increasing number of extensions are being added to Intel processors to make the benefits of Intel’s fixed function hardware blocks accessible to OpenCL applications.
Intel® Computer Vision SDK
Accelerate computer vision solutions:
- Easily harness the performance of computer vision accelerators from Intel
- Add your own custom kernels into your workload pipeline
- Quickly deploy computer vision algorithms with deep-learning support using the included Deep Learning Deployment Toolkit Beta
- Create OpenVX* workload graphs with the intuitive and easy-to-use Vision Algorithm Designer
Altera® Software (now part of Intel)
Video & Image Processing Suite MegaCore Functions (part of Intel® Quartus® Prime Software Suite IP Catalog)
Developing for:
- All Altera FPGA families
- Video and image processing applications, such as video surveillance, broadcast, video conferencing, medical and military imaging and automotive displays
Uses & Needs
- For design, simulation, verification of hardware bit streams for FPGA devices
- optimized building blocks for deinterlacing, color space conversion, alpha blending, scaling and more
Intel® C for Media and related tools
We have recently open-sourced CM runtime together with Intel media driver and CM compiler. We also put the CM package in 01.org.
The source code can be accessed by clicking the link below respectively,
- Intel Media Driver for VAAPI and Intel® C for Media Runtime: available at GitHub
- Intel C for Media Compiler and examples: available at GitHub
- Intel Graphics Compiler: available at GitHub
OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos.