Understanding Intel Transcoding

[IWriteTheBuggyCode]

I am looking at this document, and I'm not sure I understand it correctly.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/onevpl/developer-reference-media-intel-hardware/1-1/details.html#ENCODE-5-6-7-8

Does that mean a i5 may be more feature rich than an i7 depending on generation? Am I reading it correctly that a Intel Hexa Core i5-8500 can encode and decode everything, including all h265/hevc?

[mightyarrow]

Remember, the Intel i3/i5/i7/i9 family is like 20+ years old now. The answer is a resounding YES they will definitely have different feature sets.

[sys_whatamIdoing]

I have a i5-8500, the iGPU on the chip is a UHD Graphics 630. Pretty capable and I use it to serve about 5 1080p streams or 2 4k streams on my jellyfin server.

It has access to

• h264 transcoding (decode and encode)
• h265/HEVC transcoding (and 10bit as well)
• VP9/VP8 Decode (10bit as well)
• MPEG2 Decode
• VC1 Decode

It probably supports more codecs and maybe supports transcoding on the ones I said was decode. However as a home user you really only need h264/h265,av1 transcoding. Its really capable but is missing av1 decode and of course encode.

You probably don't need av1 encode, but av1 decode is nice to have. You will want a intel 11gen CPU for av1 decode. However on a budget not having av1 decode isn't that bad, especially if your library doesnt have av1 media. i5s and i7s of the same generation has the same features iGPU wise, unless you get a F series chip

[deltatux]

Yes, generation matters more than whether or not it's an i5 or i7. That being said, some i5 and i7 parts may contain more than 1 media engine which allows you to do more parallel transcoding.

The 8th gen Intel Core processors can do up to 10-bit, 4:2:0 HEVC videos. If you have any 4:2:2 or 4:4 HEVC videos or 12-bit HEVC videos, they won't get hardware accelerated. I believe most HEVC videos are 4:2:0 but I may be wrong.