I have an older i5 2400 system and attempting/testing with 3 to 4 HD 1080 30FPS Cameras.
I would like to actually use Intel Quicksync as CPU utilization is high (varying 20-50%) single camera without it.
Setting this up and testing this in Blue Iris 5 is very confusing and I have been unable to find any solid documentation on it here or in the manual.

"Turning it on" appears very confusing within itself because there are many options that *might* use the Integrated GPU:

* Default
* Intel(r)
* Intel +VPP
* Intel Beta
* DirectX VA12
* Direct3d11 VA

All which *could* theoretically use the Integrated GPU?

Very confusing,

And switching any one of them on seems to not show any difference in CPU usage and does not give any errors or indication it is working or not working.
Is there good documentation I am missing on how to go about this?

It's Gen2 i5 2400 and does indeed have Intel Quick Sync

Thanks
Steve

I'll be honest that I do not know some of the explicit ins and outs of some of those but the setting i believe you'll want to use is Intel +VPP. From experience I can say that this will attempt to use Intel w/ VPP but if your CPU doesn't support VPP.... it should still work (mine does).

The easiest way to know if your settings have 'stuck' and you're getting any benefit is the Blue Iris Status window -> Cameras tab. Honestly that one spot in the whole software package delivers the most helpful information for any tuning you might need and is a tremendous resource. Anyway, there is a column for each camera "HA". It will be blank if you're not getting any hardware acceleration but hopefully with the setting above you'll see an 'I'. Beyond that, the help document does go into a lot of detail however as you're already pointing out, sometimes I feel it lacks in thoroughly detailing what each setting is... typically it just references that they're there. Sometimes the 'other' forum (ipcam........ not to be mentioned) has some good guides on stuff like that. I tuned my system extensively with that.

Anyway, if you'd like to post a screenshot of your Status tab, we might be able to help you reign in that CPU. As you've noted, it is definitely an older CPU but we can try to squeeze it for all it's got.

Sandy Bridge is a long way down on this table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video

So **if** AVC = H264, and HEVC = H265, then your gpu acceleration should work with H264, but not H265.

It should be the same for my i5-3330 which is Ivy Bridge, but I have not tried to get it working.