Hardware Encoding¶

Setup on Linux (Intel)¶

By default, hardware encoding on Linux uses FFmpeg’s VAAPI support, which supports Intel devices.

To use VAAPI, you must also install the appropriate VAAPI driver for your device. For example, on Ubuntu, you can install all available VAAPI drivers with:

sudo apt -y install va-driver-all

VAAPI support is enabled by default in Debian & Ubuntu packages for FFmpeg.

Setup on Linux (Nvidia)¶

You may also use FFmpeg’s NVENC support on Linux, which supports Nvidia devices.

For this, set hwaccel_api in the pipeline config to 'nvenc'.

The underlying driver and special FFmpeg headers can be installed with:

sudo apt -y install libnvidia-encode1
git clone https://git.videolan.org/git/ffmpeg/nv-codec-headers.git
(cd nv-codec-headers && make & sudo make install)

NVENC support is not enabled by default in Debian & Ubuntu packages for FFmpeg. To use it, you may need to build FFmpeg from source and pass --enable-nvenc to configure. See instructions in Installing Prerequisites for details on building FFmpeg from source.

Setup on macOS¶

Hardware encoding on macOS uses Apple’s VideoToolbox API. No setup is required.

Setup on Windows¶

Hardware encoding for Windows is not yet supported, but we are accepting PRs if you’d like to contribute additional platform support. This doc may be a useful reference for hardware-related options in FFmpeg: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro

Configuration¶

To activate hardware encoding for any video codec, simply prefix the codec name with hw: in the pipeline config file.

For example, see this snippet from config_files/pipeline_live_hardware_config.yaml:

audio_codecs:
  - aac
  - opus
video_codecs:
  - h264
  - hw:vp9

Note that not all codecs are supported by all devices or APIs. For a list of supported hardware codecs, see: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro