Intel

Hardware Acceleration with Intel GPUs

Intel Quick Sync Video is the dedicated media block built into Intel's integrated graphics. It decodes and encodes without occupying the CPU cores, which is what makes it viable for transcoding on machines whose processors would otherwise struggle.

GPU Context Types

An Intel GPU can present several context types at once, and Emby prefers Quick Sync where it is available.

QsvWindows is Quick Sync on Windows, using D3D11VA interop - or on older systems and drivers, the legacy DXVA2 interop.

QsvLinux is the same Quick Sync media block on Linux, reached through VAAPI interop. The underlying filters are the same ones Windows uses; only the surrounding interop differs.

VulkanIntel is the generic, cross-vendor Vulkan interface on the same card. It is a separate context available alongside Quick Sync, not a replacement for it.

Vaapi is the generic, vendor-agnostic VAAPI context. It appears when the card's VAAPI encoder did not identify itself as Quick Sync specifically, which is why it can show up alongside the QSV contexts rather than instead of them.

Which of these exist on your machine, and which one is in use, is shown per device in Advanced Mode.

Hardware Requirements

Quick Sync first appeared in some Sandy Bridge CPUs, though not in the Sandy Bridge Pentium or Celeron parts. Which codecs a given generation can handle is documented in Intel's own material and summarised in Hardware decoding and encoding and GPU Acceleration Capabilities.

Drivers

On Linux nothing needs installing - the necessary drivers ship with Emby Server. On Windows, install Intel's graphics drivers. See GPU Setup.

What Your Card Can Do

Emby detects the encoders, decoders and filters each device actually offers, rather than assuming them from the model name, and shows them per device in the transcoding configuration. What a given GPU supports depends on its generation, its driver and the operating system, so the configuration is the authoritative answer for your own hardware.