Khronos Finalizes Vulkan Video Extensions for Accelerated H.264 and H.265 Encode

In April 2021, the Vulkan Working Group at Khronos released a set of provisional extensions, collectively referred to as ‘Vulkan Video’ which provide seamless encoding and decoding of video streams using a variety of video coding standards. The December 2022 release of Vulkan 1.3.238 saw the finalization of the extensions to decode H.264 and H.265, and today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.274, Khronos has finalized their counterpart: the extensions to enable encoding of H.264 and H.265 video streams. Leveraging the Vulkan framework, they provide a standardized, seamless, low-overhead, and highly controllable way to produce H.264 and H.265 video via hardware accelerators, with applications ranging from real-time, low-latency streaming to offline server-scale transcoding.