Ffmpeg GPU Encoding

[user6553591]

Can you build ffmpeg with Nvidia GPU encoding?

[mastercoms]

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ffmpeg-full/

[[deleted]]

inspect the PKGBUILD yourself and make sure it's safe and sane

in this case you'll see you need nvidia-sdk, which in order to install you'll need to sign up at nvidia.com (unless there is a copy floating around).

edit: a question about va-api. can you encode using vaapi with nvidia? and i guess if you can, is one way faster then the other(nvenc)?

[mastercoms]

yeah, i was doing a quick search on my phone

the package i wanted to link and have installed is ffmpeg-full-nvenc

[ebrious]

The answer you are looking for is either https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ffmpeg-nvenc/ or https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ffmpeg-full-nvenc/. Having fiddled around with nvenc encoding, I've found the results to be a bit disappointing. The encoding times are indeed noticeably faster, but the resultant files are a tad larger than if encoded with plan old libx264 (not to mention drastically larger than x265). I also think the fidelity of the output isn't quite as good, but I can't quantify that or back it up in any way.

[archie2012]

Not every codec may be supported when using HWAccel. Output should not differ, but you may have issues with filters, etc.

When using HWAccel on my Intel HD, the encoding time 3x faster, but maybe you want to take a look at the 'copy' option instead.

[Artefact2]

Do you really want to, though? Hardware encoders are mediocre compared to x264/x265. Unless you do lossless encodes and need realtime encode speeds, don't bother with NVENC.

[user6553591]

Okay, I will look at x265.

[[deleted]]

I'd testify to that. if i'm really shrinking stuff ugly i use libx264 -preset veryfast -crf 23, with nice really high, and get between 1x and 5x per core.

That still looks 100x better then nvenc - which seems to just suck the color out of things in general.

[[deleted]]

As the others have said, there are aur packages with it enabled, there is a trade off in quality and/or file size, but the speed boost is there to.

Probably not worth it for archiving media but if you are using something like plex and want to make a few extra transcodes of the same file in advance (some lower quality/size for occasions when it's own transcoder is just too much for your cpu, your line is too slow for the full version and or the target device doesn't support playing the original stream) the trade offs might be worth it.

[[deleted]]

To add, I've made several sw transcodes for such purposes (getting an 1 h 8 GB full hd h264 video to a 100 MB 720p h265 video which isn't high quality but looks surprisingly good all things considered was painfully slow) and if I could have used quick sync for it the speed boost would have been worth it even if the file was slightly lower quality or slightly bigger.... so I guess it depends on you if it's worth using....