Hello,

I'm testing VAAPI encoding and I noticed that when encoding with vaapih264enc it produces a lot of artifacts blocks on scene changes, and quality is not close to Media SDK's encoding.

My hardware: i7-6700k Skylake
OS: Ubuntu 16.04
vainfo: VA-API version: 0.39 (libva 1.7.3)
vainfo: Driver version: Intel i965 driver for Intel(R) Skylake - 1.7.3
GStreamer: 1.10.3

pipeline:
gst-launch-1.0 -v souphttpsrc location=http://xxxxxx:80/livehd/mpegts ! tsdemux ! h264parse ! avdec_h264 ! queue ! vaapipostproc width=1280 height=720 deinterlace-method=1 scale-method=2  ! videorate ! video/x-raw,framerate=25/1 ! vaapih264enc rate-control=2 bitrate=2000 keyframe-period=50 tune=1 num-slices=2 cabac=true dct8x8=true cpb-length=2000 ! flvmux ! rtmpsink location='rtmp://xxxxxx:1935/live/live_trans'

the only way you can get better results is when I don't set the bitrate and use CQP, but in our case I'm trying to use it for streaming and CBR and bitrate limit is a must.

we tried many different options for vaapih264enc to try to improve quality but we are getting same results.

How i know it is an encoder issue is because i replace vaapih264enc with x264enc and then no more quality issues.