HandBrake to Get QuickSync Support
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 27, 2013 9:01 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- CPUs
- Quick Sync
- Intel
- Haswell
The latest version of Intel's Media SDK open sourced a key component of the QuickSync pipeline that would allow the open source community to begin to integrate QuickSync into their applications (if you're not familiar with QS, it's Intel's hardware accelerated video transcode engine included in most modern Core processors). I mentioned this open source victory back at CES this year, and today the HandBrake team is officially announcing support for QuickSync.
The support has been in testing for a while, but the HandBrake folks say that they expect to get comparable speedups to other QuickSync enabled applications.
No word on exactly when we'll see an official build of HandBrake with QuickSync support, although I fully expect Intel to want to have something neat to showcase QuickSync performance on Haswell in June. I should add that this won't apply to OS X versions of HandBrake unfortunately, enabling that will require some assistance from Apple and Intel - there's no Media SDK available for OS X at this point, and I don't know that OS X exposes the necessary hooks to get access to QuickSync.
Source: Intel PR
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HotBBQ - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
Your confusing transcoding with muxing. It's not the formats, but the bit rates. I transcode 1080p content down to 720p for use on my cell phone, tablets, and internet media server. Replydoctorpink - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
are you retarded? do you even know what Handbrake is? LOL Replybobbozzo - Monday, April 01, 2013 - link
My phone (HTC Evo 4g LTE, Android 4.1.1) can play h.264 mkv files (TV shows), but cannot play the audio for some reason.My last phone (HTC Evo 4g non-lte) could not recognize mkv at all. Reply
bill.rookard - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
Yay! I hope they get it up and out soon. My UX-31 has QuickSync (i5-2467M) but transcoding takes forever. Likewise, I hope they get the OpenCL working properly (and soon). I have some pretty beefy hardware for doing the transcoding I want to do (AMD Phenom BE @ 4ghz - integrated graphics and dGPU installed) - but again, takes a while because half the hardware sits idle because it's all being done in CPU.QuickSync and OpenCL can't come fast enough. Reply
Sivar - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
I'll care about QuickSync once I see a quality/file size comparison.I seriously doubt that it's competitive with x264 in any metric other than encoding speed. Reply
mevans336 - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link
Anand has several article with full 1080p res screenshots, just do a search. The quality is virtually identical. At 1024x768 QS encodes at 461fps and x264 only manages 106. We're not talking Nvidia crap here. ReplyInternetGeek - Wednesday, April 03, 2013 - link
The x264 numbers confuse me. I use MeGUI and on my i7 it barely manages 4fps. Should I rebuild my PC? Replymediaconvert - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
so far quicksync ( ivy bridge ) doesn't come close to X264 in terms of quality at low bitrates. If intel can speed up X264 encoding AND keep the quality of X264 I'll be interested otherwise it's just another feature I won't use. Replymevans336 - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link
You are in the vast minority. I watch 1080p movies about 6' from my 47" LED LCD and I don't notice a single difference in 10Mbps x264 MKV or 10Mbps (QS) MP4 that have both been transcoded from the same source. I don't really notice a difference in QS or x264 until I hit 15Mbps ... and even then it's ridiculously minor. Definitely not worth the performance hit. Replymediaconvert - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link
At 10Mbps a 1 hour file would be 10Mpbs *3600s/8 ( 8 bit per byte)= 4500MB ( 4.5 GB ) per hour. Thats only 7 hours of hd footage on your average 32gb phone/tablet.Besides any encoder can look okay at those bit rates. If you know the Handbrake settings can get great HD results at sub 4Mbps bit rates with X264. At LOW and really low bit rates ( and hence smaller file sizes) quicksync just looks an aweful mess but X264 still looks really good. IMO quicksync is only good if you need to get something on you phone quickly. If I'm keeping the file I use X264 and handbrake to preserve the quality. Reply