Comment by tgtweak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgtweak | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah at this time intel was just releasing their quick sync tech and a few vendors were putting 4 intel cpus on a pcie board and using it for video encoding! Matrox also had a considerable piece of this business doing video compression and editing/compositing using bespoke processors and boards.

Despite being more "power efficient" - both nvidia and intel's hardware solutions left a lot to be desired in terms of final quality for the same bitrate, compared to x264 that seemed to just put out substantially better quality video for the same bitrate even at the same h264 profile levels. There are still lots of x264 design elements, some even verbatim ported, into modern av1 and hevc encoders.

Today I learned about Intel Quick Sync. Thanks. I retired from video compression in 2011, so I've been out of the loop for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video

When you run a couple of transcodes with the CPU then try doing the same work with QuickSync, it’s actually like magic.

As someone doing a lot of DVD transcoding at the time, I remember being excited for Quick Sync on my new Sandy Bridge build - only to find that, while fast, it had absolutely _horrendous_ quality. I revisited it on my previous main Plex server build, which I think was a Haswell, and it was still unusable for transcoding compared to x264.

It took Nvidia until the encoder they bundled into 20xx series cards and Intel until the 6th or 7th generation of Quick Sync, but their hardware encoders are _finally_ at a point you can get decent quality at reasonable bitrates. Even so, x264 (and x265!) beat the pants off of them if one can spare the time and electricity; they're still that far ahead.

I remember Quick Sync. Tried it on my Sandy Bridge cpu with handbrake and was amazed at the speed until I look at the video!

I even did test with a newer (at the time) Mac and the Mac was only a few minutes behind the i7-920 but the quality was junk.

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