New in Media Center 25 (25.0.17 and newer), we can now leverage the Video Encoding hardware present in modern graphics cards.
This allows much faster encoding of videos, either for handhelds, streaming, or any other purpose, and allows systems with a slower CPU to provide streaming services to remote clients, like JRemote or Panel.
At this time, we support encoding into H.264, which is the most widely used and supported video format today.
Both Panel and JRemote automatically use a H.264 based format for streaming, and if you want to benefit from the accelerated encoding for DLNA, you should pick an H.264 format as well (ie. a H264-TS variant, for example).
In the initial version of this feature, we support encoding through NVIDIA NVENC, available on practically all NVIDIA Graphics Cards from the last decade, and with Intel QuickSync, available since the Sandy Bridge generation (HD2500/HD3000 GPUs).
It should be noted that while old Graphics Cards are theoretically supported, newer cards will generally produce higher quality video streams - and especially with Intel, some older cards which no longer receive driver updates might run into unsolved bugs.
To enable hardware accelerated encoding, we've restructured the Settings -> Encoding page, so all that spare space can be put to use.
Right now there are only two options:
- Use Hardware Video Encoding if available
- Favor Quality over Performance in Hardware Encoding mode
For most cases, the Hardware Encoders are so fast that Quality should always be preferred, however if you find yourself streaming to many clients at the same time, you might need to speed it up even further and use Performance mode instead.
How does the Quality compare to using a Software encoder?
It depends. As mentioned above, newer hardware will produce a higher quality encoded video. On relatively recent hardware, for Live Streaming scenarios (ie. to JRemote/Panel or DLNA), the Hardware Encoders are really quite good, in comparison.
However, if you want the absolute highest quality when encoding a video for archival, then the software encoder might be higher quality - although also much slower.
In the future, we'll be introducing new options during MC25 to further fine tune encoding of videos, both for the Hardware Encoders and the software encoder, as well as work on further improving the performance by off-loading more tasks to the GPU.
We're also looking into supporting the encoding capabilities of AMD graphics cards in a future update.