FFmpeg 4.0 gains support for graphics cards

On some occasion we talked about ffmpeg. It is a open source tool whose function is the decoding of video formats. The tool is more common than it may seem, although in some cases it acts in the shadows as it is the engine of popular video players.

In recent days a new update has been released, which represents version 4.0. In addition to the well-known adjustments to make any playback more fluid, this time it improves the compatibility with graphics cards that created up to now the odd incompatibility. Now the process does not depend so much on the processors, passing the work to the graphics cards. 

So now it is faster and with less energy consumption when playing certain videos, initially not compatible with the player we usually use.

To date, Nvidia graphics with NVDEC support have been resisted. Therefore, compatibility with the new HEVC / H.265 should be perfect, not creating any commitment to the program that tries to reproduce it. In AMD processors, the improvement starts from H.264 and of course, H.265 is updated.

The negative part is that it is not directly available for Mac. temporarily, we can use VideoToolBox and a terminal command to use the graphics card and not the processor. The command is as follows:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -c:v h264_videotoolbox out.mp4

The difference is more than significant, especially on the latest Macs. On a 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro converting video to HEVC / H.264 would take about 40 seconds. After updating FFmpeg, the process takes just 6 seconds.

With these conversion speeds, the use of H.265 will increase. Remember that it is a codec that maintains the same quality in less space. The downside is the conversion time. With the capacity shown in this update, the H.265 format will go mainstream more quickly.


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