FFMPEG libav qsv vs cuda vs i7-4790

[JChic2]

FFMPEG libav qsv vs cuda vs i7-4790

I am using hardware accelerators to decode h264 video streams.

Both with QSV and with CUDA I do not get a significant advantage compared to the use of an i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz RAM 16GB without hardware accelerator.

To decode I use the Zeranoe libraries (FFMPEG 3.4.2) 3.4.2 the last one at this moment.

The libraries provide functions and settings to use QSV or CUDA or standard (without special settings).

The 3 modes work well, and with the windows 10 performance viewer I can see when I use one gpu or the other or when they are not used.

My problem is that without using hardware accelerators (CUDA or QSV) I get more FPS's than with hardware accelerators.
And when I use hardware accelerators I do not get a significant cpu availability.

What can they say about it or what am I doing wrong?
Thank you.

JOCh: chicahuala@gmail.com

[Mark_L_Intel1]

Hi JOCh,

Before you configure FFMpeg to use QSV, did you install Media SDK(Windows) or Media Server Studio(Linux)?

If the software stack for HW-accelerated codec is not available, FFMpeg could not use it.

The general steps:

1. Check your platform to make sure your platform has QSV available. You can go to ark.intel.com and search for processor Id, looking for "Quick Sync Video" to check if hardware-accelerated feature is enabled. For i7-4790, yes, it should have QSV enabled.
2. Install Media SDK or Media Server Studio based on which OS you are using. If you are using the chip in your posted, you are using very old processor(Haswell) which might not support well in the latest release, you can find the old release by checking the historic release notes.
3. Validate the successful installation.
4. Install FFmpeg.
5. Enable QSV for FFmpeg

You can refer to the following article for details:

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/quicksync-video-ffmpeg-install-valid.pdf

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/accessing-intel-media-server-studio-for-linux-codecs-with-ffmpeg

Mark