#qsv — Public Fediverse posts

Comment on this video (which us not shown on my Fedi instance, yay federation!)

I cannot believe that that GPU is not usable for video work. That is what GPUs are made for!

Poorly, there are a few caveats:
- there are always more DEcoders supported than ENcoders. I guess not being able to play a video (it would play but be less efficiently decoded on the CPU) is worse than being bound to #h265 instead of #av1 for recording.
- thus it makes sense that GPUs generally work flawlessly for gaming, as that is just displaying videos (or rendering content, which is kinda different, no idea why video codecs are more difficult than rendering methods)
- for every video format out there exists an encoder. If you use software rendering (on the CPU), you can use ANYTHING. Like encode to modern (and free!) AV1 using #svtav1 on any old CPU.
- if you want to encode videos on a GPU, you need drivers, but also a different encoder. On #NVIDIA you use #NVENC (NVidia ENCoder), for example nvenc_x265 for h265/HEVC videos. On #IntelArc (and afaik AMD GPUs), you use the #QSV (quick sync video) library which builds on top of #VAAPI, which is open source. So you can encode to AV1 using qsv_av1 for example.

What encoders are supported depends on the GPU a lot. Intel Arc seems to have supported the free, efficient and future-proof AV1 codec the earliest, but also the older free codecs VP9 and VP8 (also used in webm), like in a GPU I recently bought used. My older NVIDIA GPU only supports H265, which is proprietary and often less efficient than AV1 (not always, video codecs are black magic).

As OBS can use your GPU for video capture (encoding), the issue is purely in software support.

I only have experience with #ffmpeg for re-encoding videos, but that is also in many video editing tools. Try if you can get them somehow.

For NVIDIA I needed the latest proprietary drivers (#NixOS makes this extremely easy, can recommend) and ffmpeg, nvenc worked out of the box.

For intel Arc I used the regular drivers included in the kernel, but after adding the QSV runtime to my "hardware.graphics.extraPackages" I needed to recompile the entire kernel. Using a #longterm kernel (currently 6.18) makes this more viable... longterm XD.

#h265 #av1 #svtav1 #nvidia #nvenc #intelarc

boredsquirrel @[email protected] · 2026-03-12 · 03:44 UTC

Comment on this video (which us not shown on my Fedi instance, yay federation!)

I cannot believe that that GPU is not usable for video work. That is what GPUs are made for!

Poorly, there are a few caveats:
- there are always more DEcoders supported than ENcoders. I guess not being able to play a video (it would play but be less efficiently decoded on the CPU) is worse than being bound to #h265 instead of #av1 for recording.
- thus it makes sense that GPUs generally work flawlessly for gaming, as that is just displaying videos (or rendering content, which is kinda different, no idea why video codecs are more difficult than rendering methods)
- for every video format out there exists an encoder. If you use software rendering (on the CPU), you can use ANYTHING. Like encode to modern (and free!) AV1 using #svtav1 on any old CPU.
- if you want to encode videos on a GPU, you need drivers, but also a different encoder. On #NVIDIA you use #NVENC (NVidia ENCoder), for example nvenc_x265 for h265/HEVC videos. On #IntelArc (and afaik AMD GPUs), you use the #QSV (quick sync video) library which builds on top of #VAAPI, which is open source. So you can encode to AV1 using qsv_av1 for example.

What encoders are supported depends on the GPU a lot. Intel Arc seems to have supported the free, efficient and future-proof AV1 codec the earliest, but also the older free codecs VP9 and VP8 (also used in webm), like in a GPU I recently bought used. My older NVIDIA GPU only supports H265, which is proprietary and often less efficient than AV1 (not always, video codecs are black magic).

As OBS can use your GPU for video capture (encoding), the issue is purely in software support.

I only have experience with #ffmpeg for re-encoding videos, but that is also in many video editing tools. Try if you can get them somehow.

For NVIDIA I needed the latest proprietary drivers (#NixOS makes this extremely easy, can recommend) and ffmpeg, nvenc worked out of the box.

For intel Arc I used the regular drivers included in the kernel, but after adding the QSV runtime to my "hardware.graphics.extraPackages" I needed to recompile the entire kernel. Using a #longterm kernel (currently 6.18) makes this more viable... longterm XD.

#h265 #av1 #svtav1 #nvidia #nvenc #intelarc

boredsquirrel @[email protected] · 2026-03-12 · 03:44 UTC

Comment on this video (which us not shown on my Fedi instance, yay federation!)

I cannot believe that that GPU is not usable for video work. That is what GPUs are made for!

Poorly, there are a few caveats:
- there are always more DEcoders supported than ENcoders. I guess not being able to play a video (it would play but be less efficiently decoded on the CPU) is worse than being bound to #h265 instead of #av1 for recording.
- thus it makes sense that GPUs generally work flawlessly for gaming, as that is just displaying videos (or rendering content, which is kinda different, no idea why video codecs are more difficult than rendering methods)
- for every video format out there exists an encoder. If you use software rendering (on the CPU), you can use ANYTHING. Like encode to modern (and free!) AV1 using #svtav1 on any old CPU.
- if you want to encode videos on a GPU, you need drivers, but also a different encoder. On #NVIDIA you use #NVENC (NVidia ENCoder), for example nvenc_x265 for h265/HEVC videos. On #IntelArc (and afaik AMD GPUs), you use the #QSV (quick sync video) library which builds on top of #VAAPI, which is open source. So you can encode to AV1 using qsv_av1 for example.

What encoders are supported depends on the GPU a lot. Intel Arc seems to have supported the free, efficient and future-proof AV1 codec the earliest, but also the older free codecs VP9 and VP8 (also used in webm), like in a GPU I recently bought used. My older NVIDIA GPU only supports H265, which is proprietary and often less efficient than AV1 (not always, video codecs are black magic).

As OBS can use your GPU for video capture (encoding), the issue is purely in software support.

I only have experience with #ffmpeg for re-encoding videos, but that is also in many video editing tools. Try if you can get them somehow.

For NVIDIA I needed the latest proprietary drivers (#NixOS makes this extremely easy, can recommend) and ffmpeg, nvenc worked out of the box.

For intel Arc I used the regular drivers included in the kernel, but after adding the QSV runtime to my "hardware.graphics.extraPackages" I needed to recompile the entire kernel. Using a #longterm kernel (currently 6.18) makes this more viable... longterm XD.

#h265 #av1 #svtav1 #nvidia #nvenc #intelarc

boredsquirrel @[email protected] · 2026-03-12 · 03:44 UTC

Comment on this video (which us not shown on my Fedi instance, yay federation!)

I cannot believe that that GPU is not usable for video work. That is what GPUs are made for!

Poorly, there are a few caveats:
- there are always more DEcoders supported than ENcoders. I guess not being able to play a video (it would play but be less efficiently decoded on the CPU) is worse than being bound to #h265 instead of #av1 for recording.
- thus it makes sense that GPUs generally work flawlessly for gaming, as that is just displaying videos (or rendering content, which is kinda different, no idea why video codecs are more difficult than rendering methods)
- for every video format out there exists an encoder. If you use software rendering (on the CPU), you can use ANYTHING. Like encode to modern (and free!) AV1 using #svtav1 on any old CPU.
- if you want to encode videos on a GPU, you need drivers, but also a different encoder. On #NVIDIA you use #NVENC (NVidia ENCoder), for example nvenc_x265 for h265/HEVC videos. On #IntelArc (and afaik AMD GPUs), you use the #QSV (quick sync video) library which builds on top of #VAAPI, which is open source. So you can encode to AV1 using qsv_av1 for example.

What encoders are supported depends on the GPU a lot. Intel Arc seems to have supported the free, efficient and future-proof AV1 codec the earliest, but also the older free codecs VP9 and VP8 (also used in webm), like in a GPU I recently bought used. My older NVIDIA GPU only supports H265, which is proprietary and often less efficient than AV1 (not always, video codecs are black magic).

As OBS can use your GPU for video capture (encoding), the issue is purely in software support.

I only have experience with #ffmpeg for re-encoding videos, but that is also in many video editing tools. Try if you can get them somehow.

For NVIDIA I needed the latest proprietary drivers (#NixOS makes this extremely easy, can recommend) and ffmpeg, nvenc worked out of the box.

For intel Arc I used the regular drivers included in the kernel, but after adding the QSV runtime to my "hardware.graphics.extraPackages" I needed to recompile the entire kernel. Using a #longterm kernel (currently 6.18) makes this more viable... longterm XD.