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I don’t believe so. It’s just that Intel and Nvidia have put HW accelerated encoding into their consumer products. You’re free to use the CPU to transcode but

I don’t believe so. It’s just that Intel and Nvidia have put HW accelerated encoding into their consumer products. You’re free to use the CPU to transcode but you may only get a couple of streams. The quicksync on chip can do 15+ on the lower end but sacrifices encoding quality for speed. Though recent quick sync and nvenc quality has significantly improved. Edit: Intel has added the dedicated encoder chip inside most consumer (almost no xeons) where as far as I know AMD is not doing the same thing (not counting GPU encoding).

entropicdrifter 6y ago
AMD APUs/GPUs have HW accelerated encoding/decoding as well, at least in Jellyfin. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
- namibj 6y ago
  AMD's video encoding HW is comparatively poor in performance/quality. I.e., if you're bandwidth-constrained (wireless or internet uplink from home), you're likely better off with x264 or maybe SVT-AV1 on a CPU instead. Nvidia's H.265 encoder in Turing (the 2000-series of GPUs, many RTX branded) delivers superb quality for >=1080p30 real-time encoding compared to the alternatives (x264, QuickSync, AMD GPU) (x265 isn't really suitable for realtime-encoding). The only reason I haven't yet planned a concrete AMD workstation is the lack of proper rr[0] support[1] in their CPUs, and for the GPU the rather poor hardware encoding[2] that makes it infeasible to seriously stream out 2160p60 without problematic visual artifacts. [0]: https://rr-project.org/ https://rr-project.org/ [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034#issuecomment-583614673 https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034#issuecomment-58361... [2]: I have not found serious competitive benchmarks for the recent AMD hardware encoders. I would appreciate such.
  - d1zzy 6y ago
    Can you point to some independent comparisons that provide support for the "superb quality" statement for RTX GPUs vs x264? The reason I'm asking is that's not what I expect from my experience. The main issue here is the CPU necessary to get equivalent quality x264 encoding? I would expect x264 medium profile to be better quality than any (consumer) hardware solution and I can do x264 1080@30 medium encoding in real time using ~70% of my old 5820k CPU. A modern Ryzen (3600 or higher) would use even less CPU so really not an issue, for a single stream (but it seems Nvidia has artificial limits to the number of concurrent streams anyway).
    - namibj 6y ago
      Oh no. The RTX GPU would encode to H.265, I'm sorry for the bad wording. If you stick to H.264, x264 is gonna win against most stuff, except for maybe some exotic high-end broadcasting hardware/FPGA stuff.
  - entropicdrifter 6y ago
    I'm a bit confused by what you're saying. Are you saying that it's worth buying an Nvidia GPU because of the h265 performance? h264 is what most streaming devices have the capability to hardware decode, and generally is the default target of transcoding. It's pretty rare to have a device that would force your files to be encoded in h265 as opposed to h264. For me the most common use-case for transcoding is decoding an h265 file and re-encoding it as h264. For my devices that can stream either format, I usually end up in direct play mode rather than doing any sort of video transcoding
- skunkworker 6y ago
  I was referring consumer AMD CPU’s which don’t have the comparable video encoder/decoder core like what Intel quicksync offers. Building a box can be tough because almost all Xeons don’t have quicksync, so trying to get ECC and quicksync is a pain.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    If it's a desktop CPU then there will be a graphics card, which will have the hardware, unless you run truly headless. If it's a desktop APU then it has the hardware.

entropicdrifter 6y ago

AMD APUs/GPUs have HW accelerated encoding/decoding as well, at least in Jellyfin. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

namibj 6y ago
AMD's video encoding HW is comparatively poor in performance/quality. I.e., if you're bandwidth-constrained (wireless or internet uplink from home), you're likely better off with x264 or maybe SVT-AV1 on a CPU instead. Nvidia's H.265 encoder in Turing (the 2000-series of GPUs, many RTX branded) delivers superb quality for >=1080p30 real-time encoding compared to the alternatives (x264, QuickSync, AMD GPU) (x265 isn't really suitable for realtime-encoding). The only reason I haven't yet planned a concrete AMD workstation is the lack of proper rr[0] support[1] in their CPUs, and for the GPU the rather poor hardware encoding[2] that makes it infeasible to seriously stream out 2160p60 without problematic visual artifacts. [0]: https://rr-project.org/ https://rr-project.org/ [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034#issuecomment-583614673 https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034#issuecomment-58361... [2]: I have not found serious competitive benchmarks for the recent AMD hardware encoders. I would appreciate such.
- d1zzy 6y ago
  Can you point to some independent comparisons that provide support for the "superb quality" statement for RTX GPUs vs x264? The reason I'm asking is that's not what I expect from my experience. The main issue here is the CPU necessary to get equivalent quality x264 encoding? I would expect x264 medium profile to be better quality than any (consumer) hardware solution and I can do x264 1080@30 medium encoding in real time using ~70% of my old 5820k CPU. A modern Ryzen (3600 or higher) would use even less CPU so really not an issue, for a single stream (but it seems Nvidia has artificial limits to the number of concurrent streams anyway).
  - namibj 6y ago
    Oh no. The RTX GPU would encode to H.265, I'm sorry for the bad wording. If you stick to H.264, x264 is gonna win against most stuff, except for maybe some exotic high-end broadcasting hardware/FPGA stuff.
- entropicdrifter 6y ago
  I'm a bit confused by what you're saying. Are you saying that it's worth buying an Nvidia GPU because of the h265 performance? h264 is what most streaming devices have the capability to hardware decode, and generally is the default target of transcoding. It's pretty rare to have a device that would force your files to be encoded in h265 as opposed to h264. For me the most common use-case for transcoding is decoding an h265 file and re-encoding it as h264. For my devices that can stream either format, I usually end up in direct play mode rather than doing any sort of video transcoding
skunkworker 6y ago
I was referring consumer AMD CPU’s which don’t have the comparable video encoder/decoder core like what Intel quicksync offers. Building a box can be tough because almost all Xeons don’t have quicksync, so trying to get ECC and quicksync is a pain.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  If it's a desktop CPU then there will be a graphics card, which will have the hardware, unless you run truly headless. If it's a desktop APU then it has the hardware.