Accelerating Media Processing: Which Tool Do I Use?

Intel® Media SDK

Developing for:

• Intel® Core™ or Core™ M processors 
• Select SKUs of Intel® Celeron™, Intel® Pentium™ and Intel® Atom™ processors with Intel HD Graphics supporting Intel® Quick Sync Video
• Client devices - Desktop or mobile applications
• OS - Windows only*

Usages & 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

Intel® Media Server Studio

3 Editions are available

• 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/conferencing, digital surveillance), video cloud & data center
• OS - Linux* or both Linux and Microsoft Windows*

Format Support - HEVC, AVC and MPEG-Audio

Usages & Needs

• High-density and fast decode, encode, transcode
• Optimize performance of Media/GPU pipeline (-> VTune)
• Enhanced graphics programmability or visual analytics (for use with OpenCL™ applications)
• Low-level control over encode quality
• Debug, analysis and performance/quality optimization tools
• HEVC with premium quality
• Need to measure visual quality (Video Quality Caliper)
• Looking for an enterprise-grade telecine interlace reverser (Premium Telecine Interlace Reverser)
• Audio codecs
• Screen capture

Intel® Video Pro Analyzer

• Intel® CPU supporting Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2)
• OS - Windows, Ubuntu Linux*, Macintosh OS X

Format Support - HEVC, VP9, AVC and MPEG-2

Usages & Needs

• Develop for HEVC, AVC, MPEG-2 or VP9 decoder or encoder, analyze streams
• Interested in saving time and resources
• Fine-tune coding pipeline
• Inspect full decode and encode process, debug & optimize encoders
• Measure and improve visual quality (Video Quality Caliper)
• Access to detailed video stream statistics
• Innovate for UHD with HDR color support

Intel® Stress Bitstreams & Encoder

• Intel® CPU supporting Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2)
• OS - Windows, Ubuntu Linux*, Macintosh OS X

Format/Profile Support - HEVC, VP9

Usages & Needs

• Perform extensive, enterprise-grade, production-scale media validation and debug for HEVC/VP9 decoders, transcoders, players, and streaming solutions
• Develop HEVC or VP9 decoders, inspect decoding results
• Significantly accelerate validation cycles, reduce costs and speed time-to-market
• Create custom bitstreams for testing and optimize stream base for coverage and usage efficiency
• Ensure decoder is compliant to standard, runs with top performance, is robust and resilient to errors

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.