I prefer ffmpeg over Handbrake and my testing with it has proven to make files smaller than H.264 with the same or higher quality with settings that I cannot get to work with MCEBuddy…they work with FFmpeg Batch AV Converter which I can run 4 encodings at once with my system remaining usable. If I use MCEBuddy I cannot use my settings because no one will help me get them to work with MCEBuddy because I have experimented and I don’t understand how MCEBuddy passes the settings on to the GPU. The default HEVC profile in MCEBuddy is inadequate not only because it produces lower quality but it also uses software to handle the de-interlacing which not only slows down the encodes it also uses more system resources so I can only run 2 encodes at the same time to keep my system usable.
The settings I use in FFmpeg Batch AV Converter are as follow:
-c:v hevc_nvenc -c:a copy -preset hq -rc constqp -rc-lookahead 60 -spatial_aq 1 -temporal_aq 1 -nonref_p 1 -cq 26
The problem is FFmpeg Batch doesn’t do all the things MCEBuddy can and will do so I don’t like to use it because too many things in the process then become manual and I simply don’t have time or space to do it this way so I want these settings to work in MCEBuddy…except for the -c:a copy because that simply copies the audio tracks as FFmpeg Batch won’t re-encode those as MCEBuddy will.
The following profile is the one I use at the moment and it is the one you SystemIdleProcess provided me months ago except I have set ffmpeg first because I don’t like Handbrake as it consumes too many system resources:
[HEVC MKV AnyStream NVidia]
Description=HEVC in MKV hardset to use NVidia.
order=ffmpeg,handbrake
DisableEncoderReordering=true
ffmpeg-general=-threads 0
ffmpeg-video=-ss 0 -vf yadif=0:-1:1,hqdn3d -vcodec hevc_nvenc -preset hq -crf 26 -vsync 2 -map 0:v -sn
ffmpeg-audio=-acodec ac3 -map 0:a
ffmpeg-audioac3=-acodec copy -map 0:a
ffmpeg-ext=.mkv
ffmpeg-audiodelay=skip
ffmpeg-UsingHardwareEncoding=true
ffmpeg-DisableSoftwareEncoderFallback=true
The biggest problem with this profile are everything before "hevc_nvenc are software settings so they are run in software which is inefficient because you can have the GPU do these. The other problem is the -crf 26 value is once again a software setting so totally ignored by the GPU so I can only assume that with this profile the nVidia GPU is using the default settings.
I even tried just changing the -crf 26 to the correct -cq 26 value for hardware settings but there was no difference in the results encoding. I even changed the -cq value lower and lower with no change so I have no idea how MCEBuddy is passing parameters to the GPU because nothing makes a difference.
I tried my setting from FFmpeg Batch above in the MCEBuddy profile by simply taking out the audio parameters and using them as the only parameters in the ffmpeg-video line and while MCEBuddy encoded the file I tested the result was black video with sound…so I have no idea how to pass parameters onto the GPU.
I don’t know what to do at this point. I prefer MCEBuddy over all other software I’ve used for encoding but the default HEVC settings for hardware acceleration are unacceptable for any movie that has dark scenes and I have lots of horror movies. So I have not encoded anything for months now except movies I know will be fine with the current settings or ones for experimenting but I have to keep all my TS files until I can find a way to get my settings into MCEBuddy and I’m about out of space and tired of buying new hard drives so I may have to stop usingMCEBuddy because there is no documentation on how to actually change the settings in HW acceleration.
