Transcoding anything >720p is painful.
I run ancient hardware for desktop/laptop >10yrs old apple stuff running linux. I consume media mainly via rpi4 or android.
What's a minimum level system capable of trans-coding 4k video to x265 in at the very least real time? Is there a tiny trans-coding device out there somewhere?
Would a NUC do? How old or new to churn out 4k x265
Can I avoid hardware? Are cloud gpu's a thing?
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It's hard to beat a GPU in HEVC encoding performance. SoC:s have comparable performance to dGPU:s in that regard. A used zen/zen2 laptop might be a cheap and tiny workhorse for the purpose. I have a zen/vega10 matebook 2020 that does 1080p at around 2.5-3x real-time at high quality presets. No doubt it could do 4k at faster presets.
With the hardware in my arsenal I've found that AMD>Intel>nVidia, at least quality wise. VideoToolbox on Mac is down there with nVidia, and Apple silicon being pretty slow at it compared to software x265 on the same machine.
Where have you heard that about Apple Silicon? Not that I’m trying to say it’s better than the others, but it is absolutely better than software encoding on the same machine.
Post in thread 'Mac Mini M1 H.265 encoding?' https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-mini-m1-h-265-encoding.2269815/post-29606894
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/y0t4z6/hardware_accelerated_video_transcoding_apple/irviw29/
Haven't heard anything, just from memory of my own testing. Looking back at my notes I see a 40-50% speed up with VideoToolbox compared to x265 on M1, but at a lot crappier quality.
I haven't tested in quite a while, though. I wrote off doing encoding on the M1, as my AMD cards are a lot faster (and produce better results).