Really Slow Hardware Encoding with new AMD Driver

My windows update had a new driver for my Radeon R9 a couple days back and it’s just killed performance. I’ve had conversions hang and another I started tonight using MP4 High Quality profile was 37% into pass 1 after 4 hours. Turned off hardware encoding in the profile and it’s back to more normal, in this case i’m already 15% in after 10-15 minutes.
I’m not actually sure I’ve ever seen hardware encoding being used on my setup, but this issue has only arisen since yesterday and the AMD driver change is the only recent change.

Graphics drivers are responsible for efficient or buggy hardware encoding. See this topic for details: GPU/Hardware Encoding/Acceleration FAQs

If your driver updated yesterday then that’s what’s causing the issue. Revert back to the older driver. Not all drivers are made equal.
Also without the logs it’s not possible to see what’s going on b

I uploaded 2 conversion logs. I ended up cancelling both. And just to contrast, the Nancy Drew one that I did from a week ago took approx. 52 minutes. The one uploaded I stopped after 5.5 hours. If I recall it was showing almost complete but seemed stuck.

Okay a few things I noticed:

  1. Both files are being encoded at the rate, about 12fps. It’s converting from H.264 to H.264 (??) using your VCE hardware encoder and handbrake, so there’s no difference in the encoding speed.
  2. Nancy Drew is a 1 hour long video, Minority Report is a 3 hour long video, so yeah, it’ll take 3 times as long to complete!

Why exactly are you converting from H.264 to H.264? Most likely that’s why your graphics encoder is losing the plot, most of them aren’t at converting from H.264 to H.264. Maybe try using the MP4 Unprocessed profile instead, it’ll be blazing fast!

I also noticed that you’re using the MP4 High Quality 2 pass profiles (which are VERY slow in general) and I noticed that Nancy Drew didn’t even complete the conversion, your graphics driver just hung on the second pass and you terminated it. Maybe try using a single pass profile like MP4 Normal. I think the combination of H.264 -> H.264 along with 2 pass is just too much for your graphics driver.

If you still want to use hardware encoding, try using ffmpeg instead of handbrake in your profile (change the order). Also update to the latest build, we’ve made a few tweaks to the encoder setup. Change the order from order=handbrake,ffmpeg to order=ffmpeg,handbrake

Insightful logs, in the next build we’ll add better hang detection for hardware drivers but it also points to the fact that you may need more stable graphics drivers.

Probably lack of experience on my part. I’m getting a TS file from my Hauppage software and I want it in MP4 for my Plex server to avoid transcoding. The profile is reducing the size to around 1/3 of original. I’ve not tried the unprocessed profile as I was worried it’d keep a much larger file.