Handbrake with Hardware Acceleration (Nvenc) file size much larger than encoding through CPU only. What are your settings?

[TexasBulldog74]

So the Hardware Acceleration with Nvenc encoder is a whole lost faster but the file sizes from h.265 where its encoded through the CPU vs with the GPU is pretty drastic.

 

Are there settings to try and cut the difference? Looking for that sweet spot that will use the gpu but give me a smaller file size without too much quality loss?

 

 

[Phantom2022]

Try x264, everybody uses it. (it's the best H.264/265 encoder, but not HW accelerated)

[Zodiark1593]

On the GTX 960 (which uses a newer NVENC encoder than the rest of the Maxwell series), I wasn't especially impressed by the encoding efficiency. So I often stuck with x265 for my non-realtime encoding needs. Tbh, I found the Haswell gen Quicksync to be slightly better.

 

Can't say anything about the newest Nvidia cards, but the newer Intel Quicksync encoders (using 11th gen Tiger Lake) I've been pretty impressed with. Enough so that I often do my encoding on the laptop over my, admittedly pretty old, desktop. I typically have the encoder set to Quality (for best efficiency), with Constant Quality set between 22-26, depending on the video itself. If size is important, I'll push that a bit higher. For hardware encoders such as NVENC, you want to use the highest quality settings to get the best efficiency out of them. Little bit slower, but not by much.

 

If you're rocking a newer 8-core or better, then forget the hardware encoders and use x264/x265 with a Medium or slower preset, as the speed difference isn't likely to be a big factor, and the slower presets will allow for improved efficiency.