NVidia NVENC encoder with Handbrake CLI

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DavidIrwin
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Re: NVidia NVENC encoder with Handbrake CLI

Post by DavidIrwin »

Woodstock wrote: Mon Feb 25, 2019 1:33 pm He probably said it because that's what the manufacturers say about it. Hardware encoders are intended for fast processing of live video streams, so they are not particularly efficient in their encoding, and no particularly good at high quality.
that really surprises me. Given the power of dedicated graphics cards these days and the speed of encoding I am seeing using it giving away 25% of that to better quality would seem like a no-brainer. My opinion clearly :D
Woodstock wrote: Mon Feb 25, 2019 1:33 pm But, quality IS in the eye of the user. If NVENC or QSV is adequate to your eyes, then it is adequate.

I think mduell's point is that you should hang on to the original, if you intended to do anything else with it in the future.
Agree with this entirely. All of my media is copy of source anyway so should I want to go loss-less at some point then I will go back to the source. Most watching is either remote stream or transcoded by Plex on the server so no point in that for now.
Woodstock
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Re: NVidia NVENC encoder with Handbrake CLI

Post by Woodstock »

Throwing hardware at a problem does not really reduce the computational complexity. If you switch x264 and x265 to "Superfast" encoding, the software will take most of the shortcuts the hardware encoders take, and be close in speed.

The difference is that the hardware can't NOT take the shortcuts when you want higher quality.
mduell
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Re: NVidia NVENC encoder with Handbrake CLI

Post by mduell »

DavidIrwin wrote: Mon Feb 25, 2019 1:18 pm
mduell wrote: Sun Feb 24, 2019 4:19 pmNVENC is fine for throwaway encodes, but I wouldn't use it for your only archive copy of a video.
Why do you say that? I have been checking many video files whilst doing my testing and not seeing any major discrepancies in quality. It does seem better thatn iQSV on fast moving and not visibily worse that the standard software 264 encoder.
Because it's true; the hardware encoders are largely for realtime streaming applications, with a secondary use for throwaway encodes (movies for a kids tablet or whatever). If you're not seeing any difference to larger x264 encodes, your quality or bitrate target was probably too high to begin with on the prior encode.
DavidIrwin wrote: Mon Feb 25, 2019 2:01 pm
Woodstock wrote: Mon Feb 25, 2019 1:33 pmHe probably said it because that's what the manufacturers say about it. Hardware encoders are intended for fast processing of live video streams, so they are not particularly efficient in their encoding, and no particularly good at high quality.
that really surprises me. Given the power of dedicated graphics cards these days and the speed of encoding I am seeing using it giving away 25% of that to better quality would seem like a no-brainer. My opinion clearly :D
Almost all of the "power" of a graphics card is utterly useless for video encoding. See nVidia's complete flop with CUDA based encoding a few years ago before they went to the same fixed function ASIC on the side of the chip that everyone else was doing. There is no known trade to give up 25% on performance for better quality result given the hardware limitations.
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