OBS (Open Broadcast Software, the video streaming suite) has full support for QSV encoding, but they don't require an active monitor on the Intel graphics card.
Is Handbrake just enumerating the available displays and seeing if one is on an intel driver?
The entire OBS codebase is published on github, and the relevant part seems to be https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/blob/mast ... Helper.cpp - It appears they're just trying to call the relevant COM object and silently eating the error (and disabling QSV support) if it fails. While this wouldn't work for Linux or OSX, it appears to be a perfectly satisfactory way to handle things on Windows.
OBS also has support for NVEnc, if that's something else you'd like to add.
I hope this helps somewhat.
Why does QSV require an active monitor to be recognised?
Forum rules
An Activity Log is required for support requests. Please read How-to get an activity log? for details on how and why this should be provided.
An Activity Log is required for support requests. Please read How-to get an activity log? for details on how and why this should be provided.
Re: Why does QSV require an active monitor to be recognised?
Posted in developers section: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=30433
Re: Why does QSV require an active monitor to be recognised?
On Windows 8 Handbrake doesn't need an active monitor. Windows 7 does not support it.
Re: Why does QSV require an active monitor to be recognised?
I use qsv on Windows 7.