Comment by Gigachad
6 hours ago
PCs don’t need hardware encoders. There are no realtime jobs on these. You can let it encode in however long it takes.
You need hardware encoders for things like cameras because they need to encode in real time since the buffer would quickly overflow otherwise.
Use cases for hardware encoders in PCs:
- Video calls
- Screen/webcam recording
- Live streaming
- Real-time transcoding for media servers (don’t know much about this but I’ve heard it’s a thing)
- Game streaming
- Video editing (making exporting less frustrating)
Everything here is really niche, except video calls (and even that...).
In other words, unless on smart phones, don't expect broadly distributed AV2 encoding hardware.
If it does happen on PC, it will be most likely some courtesy of the hardware chip designers.
Video calls are niche, and offline encoding of video isn't?
Are you sure this isn't just “things I do are commonplace, and things I don't are incredibly niche”?
Screen recording is not niche, anyone who works remotely probably does video calls daily and the others are somewhat more niche but I'd guess that at least 50-70% of people do at least one of these things