3 ms·

I'm curious why hardware encoding is generally worse? All my experiments with it (h264/h265) have lead to significantly lower quality output to the point that I

• oefrha 6y ago
  I’ve written various applications on top of FFmpeg but never looked into encoder technicalities, so I don’t know if and why GPU encoding has fundamental limitations. I heard nvenc has vastly improved on RTX cards; I’m still rocking an old GPU so can’t verify that, but presumably that means there’s no fundamental weakness and GPU encoding is just playing catch up?
• tomku 6y ago
  Hardware encoding cares about consistent real-time output above all else, with power usage as the runner-up. It can focus on that because software encoders are just flat-out better for use cases involving quality - they have access to more flexible/accurate math, they don't necessarily have a real-time/low-latency constraint, they can be updated when new encoding tricks are discovered, they can be massively more complex without ballooning the cost of a device, etc. They're complementary options rather than competing. Each does something well, and it sounds like you want the thing that software encoding does.