Comment by 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.
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
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?
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.
Well it wouldn't be hard at all to make a POC for yourself. You could make an open source project to automate it all. I suggest using hetzner (cloud) because of the price.
You just need to use the hetzner API's to put all your video on a shared drive, write a simple job runner in whatever language you like or even simpler you could write your commands in a text file on the shared drive. Write a simple script to mount the shared drive, look for the job file on machine startup; then have your machine delete itself via hetzner API. Email yourself before that. There, you have your weekend project.