I wrote a few posts on hardware H.264 encoding (e.g. this and the latest one Applying Hardsubs to H.264 Video with GPU). A blog reader asked a question regarding availability of the mentioned Intel Quick Sync Video support with low end Intel x5-Z8300 CPU.
[…] Intel has advertised that the Cherry Trail CPUs support H264 encoding and / or QSV, but nowhere have I seen a demo of this being used […].What did you use to encode the video? Is the QSV codec available in the x5-z8300 for possible 720p realtime encoding? I’d like to see this checked in regards to using software like FFmpeg with qsv_h264 -codec and OBS. […]
A picture below explains how applications are consuming Intel’s hardware video compression offering in Windows.
Intel QSV includes hardware implementation of the encoder and corresponding drivers which provide a frontend API to software. This includes a component which integrates the codec with Microsoft’s Media Foundation API. Applications are to choose between interfacing the codec using Windows API – this is the way stock Microsoft applications work, and this is the way I used for video encoding development mentioned on the blog. Other applications prefer to interface through Intel Media SDK, which is an alternate route ending up at the same hardware-backed services.
Intel x5-Z8300 system in question has H.264 video encoding support integrated into Windows API and the services can be consumed without additional Intel runtime and/or development kit. The codec, according to the benchmarks made earlier, is fast enough to handle real-time 720p video encoding nevertheless the device is a budget thing.