After switching from libav to FFmpeg, the HandBrake developers quickly added NVENC encoder support to HandBrake. You can now select both NVENC for H.264/H.265 encoders in the drop down menu or with the command line interface:
$ HandBrakeCLI --help | grep -A12 "Select video encoder"
-e, --encoder Select video encoder:
x264
x264_10bit
nvenc_h264
x265
x265_10bit
x265_12bit
nvenc_h265
mpeg4
mpeg2
VP8
VP9
theora
With most GPUs I tried, even setting the slowest and costly preset results in the video engine not being fully utilized. Encoding times are cut to ~25%.
Awesome! No more ffmpeg command line black magic. You can now comfortably create your preset in the HandBrake gui and then use HandBrakeCLI through SSH on your awesome Plex Media Server. The build is available for both CentOS/RHEL 7 and Fedora.
Huh. I just tried both the normal h265 and NVENC h265 profiles on the same video. While the NVENC is significantly faster and doesn’t tax my CPU as much, the file ends up 65% larger and doesn’t even play in Windows Media Player. I’m using a newer 980 TI with NVENC support.
The fact that is 65% larger is normal, there is no way to have the same compression/quality ratio as in CPU encoders. The NVENC encoder is only useful for quick piping / streaming.
To be fair, with 65% larger you have been quite lucky, it means the original file was not particularly compressed. When converting from an H.265 slow preset video through NVENC, the size increases about 400% / 500%.
is it specific to any build or repo s supplied Handbrake? i installed both rpmfusion and flathub flatpak one but none of them shows me the nvenc profiles only the normal ones.. I have an Nvidia NVS 510 and official nvidia drivers installed under Fedora 28
Flatpak build should have it, and is the one you should use if you want it and you are using RPMFusion. The RPMFusion package is the last official release, and it does not contain yet support for it.
thanks the moment after i wrote it i downloaded the nightly build and had the NVENC support inmediatelly