Hardware Video Acceleration Overview

Hardware Video Acceleration is the use of a specialized video engine to decode video streams (such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 and VC-1) in order to free up the processor from having to do all of the decoding. Only some chipsets (such as the US15W and Intel^® Atom™ Processor E6xx) support a video engine. The flow of video through the various components generally is as follows:

1. The video player, such as the Intel^® EMGD-validated MPlayer, reads a video file and determines the type.

2. Based on type, the proper codec shared library object is loaded.

3. The codec loads the VA library shared library object.

4. The VA library loads the emgd_drv_video.so shared library object.

5. The emgd_drv_video.so communicates, over the X wire protocol, with the Intel^® EMGD X driver to send encoded video to the hardware for decoding.

Please follow the installation steps in Installing the VA Library to install VA library.