Google Summer of Code

This family of media software, including libVA, VAAPI-Intel-Driver, gstreamer-vaapi, libyami and libxcam. libVA is an open source software library and API specification to provide access to hardware accelerated video decoding/encoding and video processing. VAAPI-Intel-Driver is open source hardware accelerated video driver for Intel integrated graphics based on libVA. Gstreamer-vaapi is a GStreamer plugin that allows hardware accelerated video processing through libVA. libyami is an open source video codec library to accelerate video decoding/encoding based on libVA. libxcam is an open source camera library to support computational photography features like 3A and image processing. All of these projects increase the speed and performance of decoding and encoding compressed digital video, imaging and audio. They also support workload offloading from the CPU to the GPU. The latest Intel features mean decreased power use, increased mobile battery life and reduced power requirements for other types of devices as well.

Major media codecs such as MPEG-2, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP8, VC-1 and MJPEG are supported.

Intel enables these projects with the goal of reducing product time-to-market, development complexity, Build of Material costs, as well as making the user experience more enjoyable.

The Linux for Intel Media project is utilized by Google for their Chrome OS, including currently shipping Chromebooks. It is incorporated into Valve SteamOS and customized Linux distributions, as well. Google also uses these projects for the popular Android operating system.