VA-API Gets Extended With Flexible Encoding Infrastructure

Intel added a new extension to the VA-API video acceleration API over the summer called the Flexible Encoding Infrastructure.

Pointed to the work this weekend by an Intel Linux developer, VA-API Flexible Encoding Infrastructure (FEI) is described in this commit as, "The purpose of FEI (Flexible Encoding Infrastructure) is to allow applications to have more controls and trade off quality for speed with their own IPs. The application can optionally provide input to ENC for extra encode control and get the output from ENC. Application can chose to modify the ENC output/PAK input during encoding, but the performance impact is significant."

The work is supported by Intel's VA-API driver and boils down to greater control over the encoding process to optimize for quality/speed.

There are also patches pending for FEI support within the GStreamer VA-API code.