QSV_VP9 encoding test.

[sophisticles]

Hello Frisco!

Back in 2019 I bought this laptop with an Ice Lake based i5-1035G1. This processor supposedly supports hardware mpeg-2, avc, hevc, vp8 and vp9 encoding. I think I also read someone place that it support mjpeg hardware encoding as well.

The thing is that the implementations are flaky, with both Windows and Linux. When i first got this system I had managed to get qsv_vp9 encoding working but with driver updates, updates to applications, updates to Intel's SDK, this setup seemed to have lost the ability to encode qsv_vp9 though for a while i did have qsv_vp8 working.

At any rate, I recently had to reinstall Windows and Linux on this system and to my surprise, after a clean install of Win 11, qsv_vp9 is working again, somewhat.

Since i have never seen any test of qsv_vp9, here is a test featuring what i consider to be one of the nicest test sources available, the LG Chess demo:

https://4kmedia.org/lg-chess-hdr-demo/

Some of you may be wondering why I chose this source. The answer is that most people will be re-encoding either DVD, BD or UHD-BD sources, they will not be encoding from RAW or YUV or Y4M.

The tests were performed on Win 11, the workflow involved loading the source into Shotcut and producing a lossless 8-bit UT Video, this was in turn fed into Hybrid for producing the various comparison clips:

x264 - medium preset, tune film, crf 23
x265 - very fast preset, IP and PB ratio adjusted to match x264 tune film 1.1 for both, SAO disabled, crf 23
svt-av1 - preset 10, target bit rate set to 10mb/s
qsv_h264 - CQP 23/25/27 I/P/B
qsv_vp9 - cbr 12 mb/s setting, this was done via Shotcut

Note, qsv_vp9 file does not seek properly.

[pandy]

Try to use rigaya QSVEnc https://github.com/rigaya/QSVEnc

[sophisticles]

Try to use rigaya QSVEnc https://github.com/rigaya/QSVEnc

Thanks for the tip, I tried on both Linux and Windows and it didn't work.

Same when I tried from ffmpeg.

Ice Lake was the first cpu to supported hardware encoding of VP8 and VP9 and it's always been flaky, you need to get the software stack just right and even then support within various apps was iffy.

I worked for a company that had given me a Tiger Lake laptop for a while and I had tested qsv and it was much better, both quality wise and support wise but I no longer have that hardware.

Now that we have hardware av1 encoders hardware vp9 is probably redundant, still it would be nice to see what a properly working implementation could do.