GPU-accelerated video processing with ffmpeg

Solution 1:

FFmpeg provides a subsystem for hardware acceleration, which includes NVIDIA: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro

In order to enable support for GPU-assisted encoding with an NVIDIA GPU, you need:

• A ​supported GPU
• Supported drivers for your operating system
• The NVIDIA Codec SDK
• ffmpeg configured with --enable-nvenc (default if the drivers are detected while configuring)

Solution 2:

Quick use on ​supported GPU:

CUDA

ffmpeg -hwaccel cuda -i input output

CUVID

ffmpeg -c:v h264_cuvid -i input output

Full hardware transcode with NVDEC and NVENC:

ffmpeg -hwaccel cuda -hwaccel_output_format cuda -i input -c:v h264_nvenc -preset slow output

If ffmpeg was compiled with support for libnpp, it can be used to insert a GPU based scaler into the chain:

ffmpeg -hwaccel_device 0 -hwaccel cuda -i input -vf scale_npp=-1:720 -c:v h264_nvenc -preset slow output.mkv

Source: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro

Solution 3:

As Mike mentioned, ffmpeg wraps some of these HW-accelerations. You should use it instead of going for more low-level approaches (official NVIDIA libs) first!

The table shows, that NVENC is probably your candidate.

But: Be careful and do some benchmarking. While GPU-encoders should be very fast, they are also worse than CPU ones in comparison to visual quality.

The thing to check here is: Does a GPU-encoder compete with a CPU-encoder when some quality at some given bitrate is targeted? I would say no no no (except for very high bitrates or very bad quality), but that's something which depends on your use-case. GPU-encoding is not a silver-bullet providing only advantages.