People who need this know who they are. Not everything is for everybody.
I'd argue this is for nobody haha
Nobody using jellyfin plex or whatever needs it: they should just use software transcoding, it's better in pretty much every way.
- I dont want to unplug the GPU from my gaming PC and plug it into my linux server
- Then: I dont want to figure out PCI forwarding, I'll just open a port and nfs to the containers/vms (ffmpeg-over-ip v4 needed shared filesystem)
- Now: I have a homelab of 4 mini PCs and one of them has an RTX 3090 over Oculink. I need it for local LLMs but also video encoding and I dont want to do both on the same machine.
But you've asked a more fundamental question, why would people need hardware accelerated video decoding in the first place? I need it because my TV doesn't support all the codecs and I still want to watch my movies at 4K without stuttering.
I would love to learn more about this! What can I do to fully optimize ffmpeg hardware encoding?
My use case is transcoding a massive media library to AV1 for the space gains. I am aware this comes with a slight drop in quality (which I would also be keen to learn about how to minimize), but so far, in my testing, GPU encoding has been the fastest/most efficient, especially with Nvidia cards.