Benchmarking QuickSync on Broadwell and Skylake

We’re in the process of building out some new Linux-based video encoders, and we want to output to a LOT of different destinations: live streams, archived versions on disk, high-quality versions for future editing, JPEG stills, etc. QuickSync is a great way to get more out of our processors by offloading the encoding to the […]

Building FFMPEG with support for Decklink Capture and QuickSync encoding (Skylake edition)

NOTE: this document covers Intel’s Media Server Studio 2017. If you want to use Media Server Studio 2016 with an older processor, see this article. With the release of Media Server Studio 2017, Intel provides Linux with the ability to leverage QuickSync on Skylake processors. This is a welcome development, as Skylake’s graphics capabilities are […]

Building FFMPEG with support for DeckLink capture and h264_qsv encoding

NOTE: this document covers Intel’s Media Server Studio 2016. If you want to use Media Server Studio 2017 with a Skylake processor, see this article. ffmpeg has come a long way since the pre-1.0 days. With its elaborate system of routing filter outputs, its ability to capture video from video cards, and support for GPU-based […]

Building a custom CentOS 7 kickstart disc, part 1

Note: this series of articles applies to CentOS 7; for CentOS 6, see this series. CentOS (and of course, it’s upstream distro, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) has an extremely powerful, but somewhat poorly documented, tool for rapidly deploying machines and managing their configuration: kickstart. Kickstart lets you build a custom installation that can run hands-free. […]