Hey there, now that TVAI 3.0 has introduced the use of ffmpeg I wonder how difficult it would be to allow the use of software based encoders instead of NVENC.
In know this will take a lot longer to encode, but in my use case I usually upscale a lot of old videos, generally badly compressed with pre H264 codecs, and then want to store them using rather low bitrates ~2500kbs using a codec with better compression capabilities for long term storage.
The hardware encoders kind of defeat the purpose above since they aren’t as efficient as the software ones.
What I’m doing now is encoding with the ProRes HQ encoder at super high bitrates and then reencoding with software H265 at my target bitrates but I would like to avoid the duplicate encoding.
Is it possible to add software encoder support to TVAI 3?
Best
Pablo
It’s been asked a lot. A search probably would have saved you the effort, but here’s a sum-up:
If Topaz included the x265lib, they would have to make public some of their code as per the license. That’s how I understand it. If they make it public, they will have a hard time making money off of it.
Not sure if they’re still doing it, but they were including links to the resources needed to compile your own version of ffmpeg with TVAI filters enabled. As of right now, I have only heard of one person doing that on mac, and that was around version 3.0.2.
As has been stated, libx265 has not been included in Topaz’ version of ffmpeg.
Which isn’t to say you couldn’t try and construct a pipe to x265 yourself. Can’t test it right now, as I’m in the middle of rendering, but you could create a ffmpeg command line with pipe:1 in it, and output the stream to x265 directly (along with an -f fmt parameter maybe?) . Along the same way VSPpipe works (for VapourSynth).
