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Comment by jack_pp | Hacker News Reader

> Probably the one time I actually earned my salary at work was when we were about to pay out the nose for more cloud servers with GPU to process video when I noticed the version of ffmpeg that came installed on the machines was compiled without GPU acceleration !

Issue with cloud CPU's is that they don't come with any of the consumer grade CPU built-in hardware video encoders so you'll have to go with the GPU machines that cost so much more. To be honest I haven't tried using HW accel in the cloud to have a proper price comparison, are you saying you did it and it was worth it?

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Are the hardware encoders even good? I thought that unless you need something realtime, it's always better to spend the cpu cycles on a better encode with th software encoder. Or have things changed ?

I know they used to be worse, haven't tested the newest ones

They still suck compared to software encoders. This is true for both H.264 and H.265 on AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs. They’re “good enough” for live streaming, or for things like Plex transcoding, or where you care only about encoding speed and have a large bandwidth budget. They’re better than they used to be, but not worth using for anything you really care about.

That's my experience too. I transcode a lot of video for a personal project and hardware acceleration isn't much faster. I figure that's because on CPU I can max out my 12 cores.

The file size is also problematic I've had hardware encodes twice as large as the same video encoded with CPU.

Would you, or anyone else, be interested in ffmpeg in the cloud?

Connect credit card, open a web UI, send the command, the files, and eventually get the output?

I would SO love it ! I regularly take a look at the existing offerings, and there's a few options for "transcode video as API". However it's pretty costly, i regularly have batches of videos that would set me back 30 to 80 bucks if i were to transcode them in the cloud. I don't think it can be done at any price point i'd be happy with for this kind of personal project - especially considering that the alternative is just to max out my CPU for a day or two.

Well it wouldn't be hard at all to make a POC for yourself. You could make an open source project to automate it all. I suggest using hetzner (cloud) because of the price.

You just need to use the hetzner API's to put all your video on a shared drive, write a simple job runner in whatever language you like or even simpler you could write your commands in a text file on the shared drive. Write a simple script to mount the shared drive, look for the job file on machine startup; then have your machine delete itself via hetzner API. Email yourself before that. There, you have your weekend project.

Thanks for that datapoint, I was a little bummed to see ffmpeg not using any of my Macs GPUs, but the CPUs ain’t no slouch so I’ll just go with software encoding on Mac

We were a quick and dirty R&D team that had to do a lot of video processing quickly, we were not very cost sensitive and didn’t have anything other than AWS to work with, so I can’t speak to whether it was worth it :)

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