The Intel® Atom™ Processor E6xx Series for the embedded devices market includes the POWERVR* VXE core that provides video encoding capabilities, allowing to encode high definition video streams in the highly compressed H.264 format with a very low main CPU utilization, releasing the general purpose processor for other parallel workloads. This processor feature is available to application developers by means of the open Video Acceleration API (VAAPI [1]). This paper explains how the VAAPI can be applied to a real time video encoding task, explaining the VAAPI function calls flow, and the corresponding parameters.
November 17, 2009