4 ms·

At the risk of going in circles, let me try to explain one last time: All modern GPUs already have HW-accelerated encoding, including integrated Intel GPUs, an

At the risk of going in circles, let me try to explain one last time: All modern GPUs already have HW-accelerated encoding, including integrated Intel GPUs, and Nvidia and AMD dedicated ones. Despite that, HW-encoding is not used that much by video professionals because CPU encoders produce better compression given enough time. You only have to do compression once, while the video will be watched who knows many times, therefore there is no real point in making your encoding faster if the file size goes up. Your HW encoder is absolutely useless for anything else. It does not make your FX rendering faster, and cannot be used for any other codecs. Even if say, your HW matches CPU-based encoder at first, it is fixed and cannot be updated unless you buy new HW which takes millions to design. Meanwhile any old dev can contribute to x265 and figure out new psychovisual enhancements that will enhance the quality while minimising the file size. Specialized HW (i.e. ASICs) has been in existence for decades, yet despite that, there are very good reasons as to why we still use general-purpose CPUs (and GPUs) for most computing applications.

satysin 6y ago
Thanks for clarifying. That makes a lot more sense so perhaps not as exciting as Jon makes out in his video.
dbspin 6y ago
Editor / videographer here. Interested in those claims. Hardware encoded H.264 and H.265 don't have any visual quality differences when encoded at the same bitrates in the same containers, as far as I'm aware. Could you list a source for this? Have never heard of any client or production house requesting an encoding method specifically. Although granted I work at the low end of commercial shooting.
- chungus_khan 6y ago
  This is widely known and inherent to how hardware encoders work. They are limited by complexity and cannot be improved after they are manufactured, so most of the focus for them generally goes into real time applications. You can check out the blog for the x265 software encoder if you want some examples of the sort of regular improvements that get made: http://x265.org/blog/ http://x265.org/blog/ The reason these sorts of improvements are possible is because most of the power of a video encoder doesn't come from the container format but rather how effectively the encoder selects data to keep and discard in keeping with that container format. There is also a LOT of tuning that can be done depending on the kind of content that is being encoded, etc. For high end work basically nobody uses hardware encoders on the final product.

satysin 6y ago

Thanks for clarifying. That makes a lot more sense so perhaps not as exciting as Jon makes out in his video.

dbspin 6y ago

Editor / videographer here. Interested in those claims. Hardware encoded H.264 and H.265 don't have any visual quality differences when encoded at the same bitrates in the same containers, as far as I'm aware. Could you list a source for this? Have never heard of any client or production house requesting an encoding method specifically. Although granted I work at the low end of commercial shooting.

chungus_khan 6y ago
This is widely known and inherent to how hardware encoders work. They are limited by complexity and cannot be improved after they are manufactured, so most of the focus for them generally goes into real time applications. You can check out the blog for the x265 software encoder if you want some examples of the sort of regular improvements that get made: http://x265.org/blog/ http://x265.org/blog/ The reason these sorts of improvements are possible is because most of the power of a video encoder doesn't come from the container format but rather how effectively the encoder selects data to keep and discard in keeping with that container format. There is also a LOT of tuning that can be done depending on the kind of content that is being encoded, etc. For high end work basically nobody uses hardware encoders on the final product.