HARDWARE ACCELERATION
Transcoding and playing back video has become incredibly popular amongst home computer users, but it requires serious grunt to do so. Basically any PC can do the job via software, but the introduction of hardware acceleration for both playing and transcoding has become a key feature in many computer components. It first began with discrete GPUs, which included special ‘media engines’ to make the process far quicker than doing it simply via software. However, they’ve always had limitations in which file types they can support — for example, NVIDIA’s PureVideo technology only supported hardware acceleration of H.264, WMV/VC-1 and MPEG-4 videos.
Today’s CPUs now also include hardware acceleration for the process, which can bring huge energy savings when playing videos on laptops, as it’s a far more efficient process than getting the job done via software. Intel’s new Kaby Lake architecture is a prime example. While it’s very similar to the past Skylake architecture, one area that has received special attention is video decoding. The media engine within Kaby Lake now supports the latest H.265 codec, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) or MPEG-H Part 2. This latest codec is designed to handle the high demands of 4K video playback, and offers double the data compression when compared to H.264. It even supports 8K resolutions up to 8,192 x 4,320. Intel has long referred to its hardware acceleration technology as Intel Quick Sync Video, but it’s only the latest Kaby Lake (7th-gen Core) CPUs that support the newest H.265 format. To ensure you’re making the most of this CPU video hardware acceleration, make sure you’ve got the Intel integrated GPU (iGPU) enabled in your BIOS (many gamers disable this). Also install the latest drivers for the iGPU — in our case, the HD Graphics 530. Note that this iGPU only supports H.264 acceleration, which is fine for HD videos, but doesn’t support 4K. So if you’re running a 6th-Gen Intel Core CPU and want to playback 4K videos, it’ll all be done in software, which will eat up battery life quickly.
Before you get too excited about this and upgrade to the latest Intel processor, if you’re looking to use this feature to transcode your 4K videos to the latest H.265 file format, you’ll need to ensure your playback devices support this codec. And herein lies one of the main problems with transcoding and video playback — there are dozens of different codecs, and each device on the market only supports a handful of them. If you’re planning on playing back your video on a PC or Mac-based device, we highly recommend installing the freeware VLC media player, as this has the widest support for different video codecs.