Looking for a video transcoder with GPU acceleration

[Yorus]

Well, all this comes from when I tried to convert a video that wouldn't play on my parents' Samsung TV. I took a USB drive and it wouldn't play, so I converted it with the PC I have there, an Athlon 5150 AM1... and it took four hours and all that for the resulting video to not be compatible either. And since I like to tinker with hardware without spending half my salary, I've set up my HTPC there, which is currently a Core 2 Duo E6550 that performs similar to the AM1 although more per core (the AM1 is quad) but that I'm going to transform into an efficient mini-cucumber. In short, it's going to end up being a Xeon L5430 with 8Gb of RAM and a graphics card that I will probably buy second-hand within the not power-hungry ones (GTX 650/750 or maybe something inferior) and I would like to take full advantage of that configuration. The program I need must use GPU acceleration, be it CUDA, OpenCL, etc... and must obtain a real advantage from that possibility. I don't care if it's for Windows or Linux, because I will probably let it have dual boot. If it's free or has an irrisory price, better. Let's see what you know out there.

[Nemo]

I don't know if I understood you correctly. Is it something like this what you were looking for? Or what you want is that I transcode the video "on the fly" by playing it in another format to the original.
I think Plex or some similar DLNA server did something similar.

If it's not, could you explain it to me as if I were a fish a bit lost in the ocean? ;D

Best regards

[cobito]

Well, since you are a Linux user, you can try FFmpeg. Since version 2.6 it has support for hardware video encoding on Nvidia cards through NVENC. I have also read that in more recent versions they have managed to encode hardware with Intel GPUs. However, these two options are not good for obtaining final results since, although the encoding is very fast, the quality leaves much to be desired. It is more for previewing results. Here you have an example of the result with NVENC.

Apart from that, I don't know anything.

[Yorus]

@Nemo:

I'm not sure if I understood you correctly. Is it something like this that you were looking for? Or what you want is for me to transcode the video "on the fly" by playing it in another format than the original.
I think Plex or some similar DLNA server did something similar.

If it's not, could you explain it to me as if I were a fish a bit lost in the ocean? ;D

Best regards

That's one of the ones I had seen, but even though it says download for free everywhere, it turns out that the lifetime subscription costs $40. Anyway, I can try it and if it really offers advantages, I'll buy it.

@cobito:

Well, since you're a Linux user, you can try FFmpeg. Since version 2.6, it has support for hardware video encoding on Nvidia cards through NVENC. I've also read that in more recent versions they have managed to encode hardware with Intel GPUs. Anyway, these two options are not good for obtaining final results since, although the encoding is very fast, the quality leaves much to be desired. It's more for previewing results. Here is an example of the result with NVENC.

Apart from that, I don't know anything.

I had read about FFmpeg and was waiting to see if Handbrake ended up using the new versions, which is always easier with a GUI, but if it loses quality, that puts me off. I imagine that then it will do something similar to converting audio from WAV or CD to MP3, which invents things, in one case to gain compression and in another to take less time.

I'll have to keep trying things, although I see that it will be better to use the microphone and see how the Xeon behaves, since the Athlon AM1 takes 4 hours and the i5-2400s takes half an hour, so I'll give it at most an hour with the Xeon.