How to force Intel HD3000 (Sandy Bridge) to display 4K (3840×2160) resolution

Imagine you purchased some cool new 4K TV and you want to display photos at maximum resolution from your laptop or perhaps use the display for your huuuge Excel spreadsheets, but your old crappy laptop says it cannot go beyond fullHD (1920×1080 or 1920×1200). Phew. The issue is with the older DisplayPort or HDMI standards.

It is however often possible to force some display mode that can fit with its bandwidth and frequency requirements to the older standards. I was able to play full 4K on an old Sandy Bridge laptop (HP Elitebook 8460p) with integrated Intel HD3000 graphic adapter, however only at mediocre 20 Hz resolution with GTF or CVT 1.1 timings (With CVT 1.2 reduced blanking even 24 or 25 Hz should be possible). At 1440p, it was capable of 30 Hz even on GTF. While 20 Hz is useless for watching films, 24 or 30 Hz may be sufficient (the TV does not flicker anyway, it just displays the same frame 2 or 3 times to fit the native 60 Hz panel…). For a slideshow of photos or working with Adobe Lightroom or Excel, even 20 Hz may be sufficient.

Pokračování textu How to force Intel HD3000 (Sandy Bridge) to display 4K (3840×2160) resolution

How to encode hardware-accelerated h264 video in Shotcut with Intel GPU Quicksync

Shotcut is a great open source non-linear video editor. Its default configuration however does not allow to render video on Intel GPU (such as Intel HD 4000 and newer) using Quick sync technology (hardware acceleration allowing realtime encoding of fullHD video to h264 or on newer cards even hevc a.k.a. h265. I found a way how to hack Shotcut by replacing its ffmpeg with a build that is compiled with sqv support (codecs h264_sqv, hevc_sqv etc.) and then finding the right additional parameters to encode the video. This quick guide will show you how I did it on an older laptop with Windows 10 64bit and Ivy Bridge Intel i5-Mobile CPU with Intel HD 4000 graphics (h264_qsv only), and confirmed it working on a newer Skylake i5 desktop CPU with Intel HD 530 (both h264_qsv and hevc_qsv).

Pokračování textu How to encode hardware-accelerated h264 video in Shotcut with Intel GPU Quicksync