Comment by radicality

4 days ago

Are the hardware encoders even good? I thought that unless you need something realtime, it's always better to spend the cpu cycles on a better encode with th software encoder. Or have things changed ?

7 comments

radicality

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jmb99  3 days ago

They still suck compared to software encoders. This is true for both H.264 and H.265 on AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs. They’re “good enough” for live streaming, or for things like Plex transcoding, or where you care only about encoding speed and have a large bandwidth budget. They’re better than they used to be, but not worth using for anything you really care about.

zos_kia  3 days ago

That's my experience too. I transcode a lot of video for a personal project and hardware acceleration isn't much faster. I figure that's because on CPU I can max out my 12 cores.

The file size is also problematic I've had hardware encodes twice as large as the same video encoded with CPU.

  • jazzyjackson  3 days ago

    Thanks for that datapoint, I was a little bummed to see ffmpeg not using any of my Macs GPUs, but the CPUs ain’t no slouch so I’ll just go with software encoding on Mac

  • siscia  3 days ago

    Would you, or anyone else, be interested in ffmpeg in the cloud?

    Connect credit card, open a web UI, send the command, the files, and eventually get the output?

    • zos_kia  3 days ago

      I would SO love it ! I regularly take a look at the existing offerings, and there's a few options for "transcode video as API". However it's pretty costly, i regularly have batches of videos that would set me back 30 to 80 bucks if i were to transcode them in the cloud. I don't think it can be done at any price point i'd be happy with for this kind of personal project - especially considering that the alternative is just to max out my CPU for a day or two.

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