What is current status for hardware H.265 encoding.

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

Please don't post enormous images like that, it blows up the entire forum layout.

doom9 should upgrade the forum software so that it automatically scales images to the size of the post with the ability to enlarge.

[WhatZit]

Originally Posted by hajj_3

Those big figures on the slide are when comparing to 4000 series intel chips not 7000 series chips. Ridiculously misleading.

4th Generation Intel is the median that most people own, and most of those "most people" are due to think about an upgrade right about now. For example, I average a 4-5 year upgrade cycle, so "now" is perfect timing for my 3rd Gen gear.

What Intel are desperate to do is market an Intel solution for the 4th Gen owners rather than have them explore an AMD solution.

Would be nice to know if there are any encoding/decoding performance/quality improvements in these 8th gen chips but no info has been released so far to my knowledge.

I'd LOVE to see a QSV MAIN10 vs MAIN HEVC quality shootout, but I can't find anything even remotely like it online. Guess I'll be seeing for myself once I upgrade in a couple of months.

[NikosD]

Originally Posted by hajj_3

Would be nice to know if there are any encoding/decoding performance/quality improvements in these 8th gen chips but no info has been released so far to my knowledge.

According to anandtech.com and various sources, the iGPU of "8th" generation Core is the same as the iGPU of the 7th generation Core.

The only difference is clock speed.

[ShogoXT]

Hi everyone sorry for the bit of a old bump, but I feel this thread is still relevant today.

Live x264 encoding works right now, but I feel like because of how complex x265, vp9, and av1 will become, hardware encoders will surely take over vs expensive stream pcs in terms of "adequate" quality vs speed. I was pleasantly surprised to hear HEVC Nvenc was actually nearly equal to x264 on medium.

Now for my question. I been playing with stream settings on the program OBS, messing with custom x264 commands and such. Now I have been testing out nvenc more.

Does anyone know what 2 pass does exactly? Is it valuable for live encoding purposes? For Twitch it doesn't need to be super low latency (usually hits view at 15-20 seconds) setting which I assume those presets are meant for Nvidia Shield and such.

I always thought the asic encoders weren't that great at self analysis as they have more strict limitations, so most of the time you wanted to run it without that option, and the second encoder was meant for dual streaming.

The only relevant post I could find was this:
https://obsproject.com/forum/threads...-3#post-211863

Thanks

[Selur]

Does anyone know what 2 pass does exactly?

It encodes each frame twice, was what it said in one of the NVEnc SDK pdfs iirc.
I doubt that it's useful for lice encoding, but 'usually hits view at 15-20 seconds' might be enough to use this.

[IgorC]

Originally Posted by ShogoXT

I was pleasantly surprised to hear HEVC Nvenc was actually nearly equal to x264 on medium.
Thanks

Intel H.265 encoder with speed@60fps is on par with x264 Placebo.
And that's actually old their H.265 encoder. Their new one should be even better.

http://www.compression.ru/video/code...son/hevc_2016/

[nevcairiel]

Note that the Intel Media Server Studio (MSS) HEVC Encoder is not what you get when you do "QuickSync" Encoding, its a separate and commercial product you have to buy (its one of the features missing from the free Community-edition of Intel Media Server Studio) - and its expensive.

[benwaggoner]

As codecs have gotten more complex, they've become less suitable for ASIC and GPU acceleration. So many coding options to choose between means latency between main and HW memory becomes a huge slowdown. And CPU's look a lot more like DSP these days with many cores and SIMD functionality like AVX2 and beyond.

Fixed-function encoders need to tape out well before they hit market, and psychovisual tuning of more complex standards takes a long time and makes a huge difference. So no fixed-function solution will be able to approach quality of the software encoders available by the time they are available in products.

Broadcast-grade encoders have increasingly moved to CPU and software defined solutions over the last decade.

I can see FPGA accelerated potentially being competitive, but we haven't seen any competitive real-world implementations yet.

[IgorC]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

Note that the Intel Media Server Studio (MSS) HEVC Encoder is not what you get when you do "QuickSync" Encoding, its a separate and commercial product you have to buy (its one of the features missing from the free Community-edition of Intel Media Server Studio) - and its expensive.

Yes, it's most likely cheaper to buy 16-32 core CPU and use x265 at that point.

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

Note that the Intel Media Server Studio (MSS) HEVC Encoder is not what you get when you do "QuickSync" Encoding, its a separate and commercial product you have to buy (its one of the features missing from the free Community-edition of Intel Media Server Studio) - and its expensive.

Does their commercial product have better compression than their quicksync then? Are there are reviews comparing them or public specifications of the differences, would be nice to know.

[easyfab]

Last time I try, h264_qsv was better than hevc_qsv and 2x faster.

h264_qsv has more options available ( look-ahead, B-pyramid .... )

I see that with latest drivers b-pyramid and weighted-b frame is in. I will try to do some tests to see the improvements.

[nevcairiel]

Originally Posted by hajj_3

Does their commercial product have better compression than their quicksync then? Are there are reviews comparing them or public specifications of the differences, would be nice to know.

Its entirely unrelated products, so yes, much better. Why would anyone buy it otherwise?
The Intel MSS Encoder is basically a software encoder with hardware acceleration, while QuickSync is a full hardware encoder. Full hardware is faster, but as outlined in various posts above, also quite limited in quality.

[hajj_3]

Nvidia 8.1 SDK is out, supports b-frames in h264 and other improvements: https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-video-codec-sdk

[shades]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

As codecs have gotten more complex, they've become less suitable for ASIC and GPU acceleration. So many coding options to choose between means latency between main and HW memory becomes a huge slowdown. And CPU's look a lot more like DSP these days with many cores and SIMD functionality like AVX2 and beyond.

Fixed-function encoders need to tape out well before they hit market, and psychovisual tuning of more complex standards takes a long time and makes a huge difference. So no fixed-function solution will be able to approach quality of the software encoders available by the time they are available in products.

Broadcast-grade encoders have increasingly moved to CPU and software defined solutions over the last decade.

I can see FPGA accelerated potentially being competitive, but we haven't seen any competitive real-world implementations yet.

What about stuff like this?
http://www.advantech.com/products/pc...ngth_pcie_card
And there are cheap x264 cards on eBay

Has anyone had any luck (reasonable qualtiy output) with this sort of stuff?

[foxyshadis]

Originally Posted by shades

What about stuff like this?
http://www.advantech.com/products/pc...ngth_pcie_card
And there are cheap x264 cards on eBay

Has anyone had any luck (reasonable qualtiy output) with this sort of stuff?

Broadcast encoding is never particularly efficient, but they get around that by throwing tons of bitrate at the problem. When they don't, quality suffers enormously. Those cards are basically NvEnc on steroids, using simple searches and no RDO with extremely fast memory -- and a few bottlenecks turned into inflexible hardware paths -- to get better-than-CPU speed, rather than being hyper-efficiently designed around the nuances of the spec. RDO in particular is still a parallel-killer, since the best decision depends on the exact encoding of the last best decision.

When predictable speed is all that matters, hardware will always be key, but there's a low ceiling for the maximum quality you can get out of an FPGA/ASIC without reducing it to near-CPU speed.

Intel MSS is a different beast; it's essentially a good software encoder with lots of knobs to twiddle with a few hardware-accelerated paths, but it gets most of its speed gain by being paired with insanely fast eDRAM on Iris Pro models. Otherwise, it's just SW encoder speed to go with SW encoder quality. Nvidia or AMD could dedicate their GDDR5 to it to crunch a lot harder for the same fps, but they haven't seemed willing to so far; cheap and good enough is good enough.

[foxyshadis]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

Note that the Intel Media Server Studio (MSS) HEVC Encoder is not what you get when you do "QuickSync" Encoding, its a separate and commercial product you have to buy (its one of the features missing from the free Community-edition of Intel Media Server Studio) - and its expensive.

That changed last week, Intel released their full HEVC GPU module in the Windows 2018 R1 community release. They haven't yet done it in the Linux version for some reason.

[shades]

Originally Posted by foxyshadis

That changed last week, Intel released their full HEVC GPU module in the Windows 2018 R1 community release. They haven't yet done it in the Linux version for some reason.

I just downloaded the Linux linked version from the Intel site if you're interested.

MediaServerStudioEssentials2018R1.tar.gz

[shades]

Originally Posted by foxyshadis

Broadcast encoding is never particularly efficient, but they get around that by throwing tons of bitrate at the problem. When they don't, quality suffers enormously. Those cards are basically NvEnc on steroids, using simple searches and no RDO with extremely fast memory -- and a few bottlenecks turned into inflexible hardware paths -- to get better-than-CPU speed, rather than being hyper-efficiently designed around the nuances of the spec. RDO in particular is still a parallel-killer, since the best decision depends on the exact encoding of the last best decision.

When predictable speed is all that matters, hardware will always be key, but there's a low ceiling for the maximum quality you can get out of an FPGA/ASIC without reducing it to near-CPU speed.

Intel MSS is a different beast; it's essentially a good software encoder with lots of knobs to twiddle with a few hardware-accelerated paths, but it gets most of its speed gain by being paired with insanely fast eDRAM on Iris Pro models. Otherwise, it's just SW encoder speed to go with SW encoder quality. Nvidia or AMD could dedicate their GDDR5 to it to crunch a lot harder for the same fps, but they haven't seemed willing to so far; cheap and good enough is good enough.

VEGA-3310
4K HEVC Broadcast Video Encoding/ Decoding / Transcoding Card
35W seems a lot less than nVidia card, still, I haven't tried one. Here's a blurb from the Datasheet.

"The technology behind VEGA-3310 can do the same task in under 35W, and VEGA-3310 can also support
up to 4Kp120 high frame rate for next generation sports broadcasts and 360 degree VR applications..
This card feature a simple-to-use API and example code for FFmpeg and GStreamer multimedia frameworks to streamline product development and integration into existing applications."

[xabregas]

The biggest improvements might be the new amazon hevc CRAP when comparing to their old H264.

Congrats to all the people that are working in HEVC. So many years to finnaly sell something thats worst in every way against previous stuff. Instead of improving...

Yeah Yeah You save bandwith at the cost of our eyes. Same quality my ass. Its a macroblock and banding feast in every official BS stream i put my eyes on.

Even some UHD blurays suffer....

[shades]

Originally Posted by xabregas

The biggest improvements might be the new amazon hevc CRAP when comparing to their old H264.

Congrats to all the people that are working in HEVC. So many years to finnaly sell something thats worst in every way against previous stuff. Instead of improving...

Yeah Yeah You save bandwith at the cost of our eyes. Same quality my ass. Its a macroblock and banding feast in every official BS stream i put my eyes on.

Even some UHD blurays suffer....

You must be doing something different to me. I can see a clear video improvemnt at the same bitrate using handbrake and x265 over x264. Mind you, it's using software encoding, not hardware.
This is using a BluRay rip of media, which is already encoded. So, If I rip say 50 gig, then recode it down to 3 gig, x265 wins every single time hands down. Recoding to x264 at 3 gig size looks terrible in comparison.