July 3, 2016

Enable hardware acceleration for Intel Quick Sync in CentOS

Nimble Streamer Transcoder supports Intel® Quick Sync technology for both software video encoding and hardware encoding acceleration using Intel® processors feature set. Nimble Streamer allows using Quick Sync as a H.264 video encoder in transcoding scenarios.

Once you have Quick Sync installed, the software encoding is available in our Transcoder by default while hardware acceleration needs to be enabled separately. The instructions below describe how to enable hardware acceleration on Linux.

There are currently two SDKs for Linux which support QuickSync technology, their choice depends on your hardware capabilities. Each SDK is released as part of respective Media Server Studio so you need to choose what works best for you and follow its instruction. Once it's set up, you will need to install Live Transcoder itself and then proceed with transcoding scenarios.

Media Server Studio 2017 (Skylake and Broadwell support)

This SDK is supported in CentOS 7.2-1511. Install 64-bit CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1511.

When installing, you should use the "Development and Creative Workstation" base environment.

Do not update the system via yum update. The installed default components are required.

Now go to this link, click "Get the Linux* Community Edition for Free". The new page will require registration or login. Once you log in, please select 2017_R1 or 2017_R2 (this one is preferrable) releases, others are not supported on this OS.

Then follow these instructions:

$ tar -xzf MediaServerStudio*.tar.gz
$ cd MediaServerStudio*
$ tar -xzf SDK2017*.tar.gz
$ cd SDK2017*/CentOS
$ tar -xzf install_scripts_*.tar.gz
$ su
# ./install_sdk_CentOS.sh
# reboot

Full setup instruction called Getting Started Guide can be found in SDK archive as media_server_studio_getting_started_guide.pdf. Please refer to it for details.

Media Server Studio 2016 (Broadwell and Haswell support)

This SDK release requires CentOS 7.1 for Quick Sync acceleration to work properly.

Current releases of Intel SDK only support Haswell and Broadwell architectures.

Install 64-bit CentOS 7.1-1503 from http://vault.centos.org/7.1.1503/isos/x86_64/

When installing, you should use the "Development and Creative Workstation" base environment.

Do not update the system via yum update. The installed default components are required.

Install Intel® Media Server Studio Free Community Edition for Linux from https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-media-server-studio according to Intel® Media Server Studio Getting Started Guide:

As root

# usermod -a -G video [LOGIN]

As regular user

$ tar -xvzf MediaServerStudio*.tar.gz $ cd MediaServerStudio* $ tar -xvzf SDK*.tar.gz $ cd SDK* $ cd CentOS $ tar -xvzf install_scripts*.tar.gz

As root

# ./install_sdk_UMD_CentOS.sh

# mkdir /MSS

# chown {regular user}:{regular group} /MSS

As regular user:

$ cp build_kernel_rpm_CentOS.sh /MSS

$ cd /MSS

$ ./build_kernel_rpm*.sh

As root:

# cd /MSS/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64

# rpm -Uvh kernel-3.10.*.rpm

# reboot

Full setup instruction called Getting Started Guide can be found in SDK archive as media_server_studio_getting_started_guide.pdf. Please refer to it for details.

Install Nimble Streamer Transcoder

Follow Transcoder CentOS 7 installation procedure and then follow this article to set up hardware encoder parameters.

After that you'll be all set to use Intel hardware acceleration on Linux with our live Transcoder.

If you face any questions, feel free to contact us for any questions.

Nimble Streamer on CentOS, Red Hat and Debian

Our team created Nimble Streamer to be installed on Linux OS. This is the platform which is best fit for high-load projects. Obviously most streaming media projects are born to be highly loaded, this is why we chose Linux as target platform.

Initially we started with Ubuntu Linux which is once of the most popular OSes on the market. Now we've made the step forward and made Nimble Streamer available on several other flavors of Linux.

Here's the full list of operating systems where Nimble Streamer is tested before every release:

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid
Ubuntu 12.04 Precise
Debian 6.0.8 Squeeze
Debian 7.2 Wheezy
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
CentOS 6

Please read the latest version of Nimble Streamer installation instructions. to see how it needs to be properly installed on these platforms. There are few easy steps there and also links to how-to pages describing the installation process in details and pictures.

Feel free to contact if you need any help with setting up and tuning Nimble Streamer.

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