VP9 encoding support on Windows

[Marius]

Hello,

I am using the Intel Media SDK for Windows and encounter issues when trying to initialize hardware-accelerated VP9 encoding (MFXVideoENCODE_Query returns MFX_ERR_UNSUPPORTED). My setup looks like following:

• Windows 7 64-bit
• Intel Media SDK for Windows 2018 R2
• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz
• Intel(R) HD Graphics 530  (Version 21.20.16.4860)

Therefore, I would have two questions:

1. Is VP9 encoding supported for this chip?
2. Do I have to load a plugin before I can use the VP9 encoder (similar to the HEVC plugin)?

Thank you very much in advance!

[Mark_L_Intel1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Marius,

I don't support VP9 encoder yet but as you can see from the hardware spec, it should be supported by hardware with limited spec. Different hardware might support different VP9 spec, you might check them carefully:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/core/7th-gen-core-family-desktop-s-processor-lines-datasheet-vol-1.html

From our open source driver, it says to support on Ice Lake, so my guess is, the Windows release will support VP9 on ICL too with the new release this year, but please keep check our website for accurate information when it released.

https://github.com/intel/media-driver

Mark

[Marius]

Hi Mark,

thank you very much for your response, it helped a lot.

Another question: Is software or hardware support for encoding VP8 (not VP9) available inside the Intel Media SDK for Windows?

[Mark_L_Intel1]

Hi Marius,

We don't support VP8 encoder both hardware and software, there was other post asked this:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-media-sdk/topic/804036

Mark

[Marius]

Hi Mark,

thank you for the answer, that would be all from my side.

[Mark_L_Intel1]

Hi Marius,

May I have one more question?

As I mentioned, we are planning VP9 encoder support. So I think this is the best chance to collect the customer feedback for development team.

In your case, do you have any features expected? For example, 

• Bi-directional motion prediction support
• Temporal scalability
• Dynamic scaling
• Or you can have your own preference?

We would be really appreciated if you have some feedback.

Mark

[Marius]

Hi Mark,

we weren't necessarily interested in a specific feature of VP9. Instead, some early tests showed promising compression numbers while retaining better visual quality.That's what mostly draw our attention to the VP9 codec.

I hope that helps!

-- Marius

[Mark_L_Intel1]

Thanks so much,

Make sense, this is like H264 vs HEVC.

I will tell dev team about this.

Mark

[Robinson__UK]

To add my .2p, if you're canvassing requirements, we have two main ones: very fast encode and decode (our process is 60 fps 1280x720) and we would much prefer 10 bit to 8 bit. 

[Mark_L_Intel1]

Thanks so much,

I will let the dev team know but from what I can see 720p@60 and 10 bit should be supported. But I will double check

The other news for this week is, SVT-AV1 Intel announced this week with Netflix. This is a software encoder on Xeon D/scalable processors. You can check https://01.org/svt for details but in general, this encoder supports HEVC, VP9 and AV1.

Mark