Intel have just announced their Media SDK 2013, the software development kit that lets developers get to some of the unique media transcoding features found in the Intel processing platforms. As a core part of Intel Quick Sync that you find used in video conversion and video editing tools it’s something that can really help those video editing and rendering sessions and can help to improve battery life under these operations.
New features in the SDK allow the addition of an open-source software dispatcher, support for special features in Haswell and, for the first time, Atom tablet platforms. The SDK is for Windows desktop apps although some of the hardware is already exposed through the Windows 8 applications programming libraries.
In addition to conversion the Media SDK gives you access to some new features in Haswell like hardware-accelerated frame rate conversion, denoise and stabilisation. For platforms that don’t offer hardware acceleration of these services you still get optimised libraries to use with CPU-based processing. 4K processing is supported and that could be important for Haswell which also includes 4K output support.
Ryan Tabrah of Intel presents the Media SDK 2013 and we had a chance to speak to him. 4K encode and decode is clearly one of the big announcements here although we had a good discussion about perceptual computing too.
If you’re at CES 2013, check out one of the 4 Developer Univeristy sessions where you can listen to Ryan, ask questions and have the chance to win an Ultrabook.
If you’re not at CES 2013 a PDF of the main features is available here. SDK Website here. Don’t forget the related OpenCL SDK and Perceptual Computing SDK which just got a refresh to 2013 Beta version.
