News: GPU acceleration of Nvidia NVENC and AMD VCE has been added to HandBrake 1.2.0

Video transcoding used to be a CPU intensive and time-consuming process. Now because of the dramatic increase of generic compute blocks and the improvement of discrete GPU video codec SDK, hardware based video encoding is possible, faster than ever.

Additional Handbrake cuda acceleration selection Movavi Video Converter Whenever we need to change the format of any of our video or audio files to enjoy them on a different device, all we usually want is a simple converter capable of transcoding all our files in one. Steps to Force HandBrake to Use GPU. First, open HandBrake by searching for it in the start menu. After opening HandBrake, click on the “Preferences” link appearing on the bottom left corner. You can also open the same from “Tools → Preferences”. The Most Possible Reasons That Make HandBrake Rip Slow. Google Chrome Slows Down Handbrake. When VideoToolBox is enabled, Google Chrome will make Handbrake slower by 30% (compared to Safari) though the GPU acceleration is supposed to speed up Handbrake DVD ripping/video transcoding. HandBrake also adds GPU acceleration support little by little. You could enable NVIDIA CUDA acceleration and NVENC encoding in HandBrake to get faster HandBrake encoding. It’s quite simple to enable GPU encoding in HandBrake: Download and install HandBrake on your computer.

HandBrake also adds GPU acceleration support little by little, which however leads to a few questions that continue to puzzle some of you, like No NVENC in HandBrake, how to enable HandBrake GPU acceleration, etc. We sort out those frequently asked questions about HandBrake GPU accelerated (x265) video encoding and list the answers for you here.

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Top 6 Frequently Asked Questions for Handbrake GPU Acceleration

• Q1: No NVENC or CUDA in HandBrake?
• Q2: Why Handbrake GPU is using 100% CPU?
• Q3: Can HandBrake GPU acceleration Be Applied in macOS, Windows or Linux?
• Q4: How to Enable GPU Based Encoding in Handbrake?
• Q5: HandBrake CPU or GPU Encoding, Which Is Better?
• Q6: Use HandBrake Intel QSV or NVEnc Acceleration?
• Q7: Any Other GPU Accelerated Video Encoder Like HandBrake?

Q1. No NVENC or CUDA in HandBrake?

'Does HandBrake use GPU acceleration? Why are there no NVENC or CUDA hardware-accelerated encoding options in HandBrake?'

Answers:
1. You are using an old version HandBrake. Upgrading to HandBrake 1.2.0 or above may solve the problem. HandBrake 1.1.2 and before only supports Intel QSV. The version 1.2.0 released in Dec. 22, 2018 already added the support for GPU video encoding with Intel QuickSync, Nvidia NVEnc, and AMD VCE. Check Handbrake tutorial here >>

Note: It is reported that Google Chrome will slow down the low-level VideoToolBox framework (Quick Sync Video acceleration tech). This has caused 30% speed loss using Handbrake with Chrome running in the background compared to Safari. If you see the slow downs, you can: 1, close Chrome; 2, disable Handbrake QuickSync; 3, try another free GPU accelerated video encoder like WinX DVD Ripper.

2. Check if your Nvidia GPU supports NVENC or not.

• Go to the List of Nvidia graphics processing units Wikipedia page.
• Ctrl + F and put in your graphics card exact name.
• Then get the corresponding Code name. GPUs in code name staring with GK, GM and GP support NVENC technology, while others do not.

3. Install, reinstall or update your Nvidia graphics card driver.

4. Suppose that you are running, for example an MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X GPU, NVENC should be available. And other programs such as DVDFab or WinX DVD Ripper do allow GPU accelerated video encoding, but HandBrake still doesn't have the option. Try to reboot your computer, download a new setup file from HandBrake official website, and then uninstall and reinstall the freeware to give it one last shot.

Q2. Why Handbrake GPU Encoding is using 100% CPU?

'I was trying to use ENEnc to encode but find that it barely utilizes my GPU.The encoding FPS is also very slow: it's only about ~75fps, while I should be able to achieve ~420 fps using a tool called NVEncC. Also, the CPU was also constantly 100% during encoding, makes me suspect somewhere else in HB's workflow was neckbottled.'

Some users may believe that as Handbrake supports GPU encoding, it should use only a tiny part of CPU and rely most tasks to the GPU. In fact, except the video encoding, other tasks such as the decoding, muxing, filters, etc. are performed by the CPU. So it's normally to see high and even 100% CPU usage during Handbrake GPU encoding.

This is why the Level-3 Hardware Acceleration can deliver a much faster speed. This tech can apply GPU hardware acceleration during the decoding, video processing, and encoding, pushing the whole task by about 5x faster than Handbrake. By far, WinX DVD Ripper is the only free DVD ripper that comes with this function.

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Q3. Can HandBrake GPU acceleration Be Applied in macOS, Windows or Linux?

'I am uncertain if I can use handbrake on Mac to rip Blu-ray disks to drop into my iTunes library while capitalizing on my GPU.'

Answers:
1. HandBrake can be running on Linux, Mac and Windows using GPU acceleration, but there are system requirements. Processor needs to be Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD Athlon X2 or better. To be specific:

• Ubuntu: LTS versions are supported.
• Mac: macOS 10.10 Yosemite and later is required (64-bit only).
• Windows: Windows 7 SP 1 or later is required (64-bit only).

2. For your information, HandBrake can't rip Blu-ray discs for DRM reasons, let alone GPU accelerated ripping. Installing libdvdcss can solve part of the copy protection problems of DVD disc.

Q4. How to Enable GPU Based Encoding in Handbrake?

Here we take DVD transcoding as an example. Follow the next steps to configure HandBrake to use GPU acceleration.

Step 1: Go to the official HandBrake download page , download and install HandBrake (1.3.1) for Windows, Mac OS or Linux.

Step 2: Download third-party libdvdcss and drag it to the HandBrake setup file directory. If you skip this step, the reading of encrypted DVDs will crash with error. You can see it from the preview window.

Step 3: Enable HandBrake GPU acceleration

• Insert your DVD disc into the drive and open HandBrake.
• Click Open Source, select the DVD option to load the content, and then switch to Video tab.
• In the Video Codec option, choose H.264 (Intel QSV), H.264 (Nvidia NVEnc), H.265 (Intel QSV) or H.265 (Nvidia NVEnc).

Step 4: Choose an output preset or set video parameters by yourself. Remember that there is a tradeoff between speed and quality/size. So make a decision based on your needs.

• CQ (19-21) is recommended and don't go above 22 RF when ripping a DVD.
• Choose Same as source for Framerate.
• Denoise NLMeans filter is very memory intensive, drastically slowing your encodes down.
• Encoder Level 6 and higher is required for 8K video encoding, while 5-5.2 for 4K video transcoding. Well, HandBrake doesn't support that.

Q5. HandBrake CPU or GPU Encoding, Which Is Better?

'Last year someone asked here if GPU encoding was worth it and was told to stick to CPU encoding. But HandBrake x265 encoding takes too long. CPU or GPU encoding, which should I use?' - from Reddit

Answers:
Generally speaking, the priority of CPU encoding is quality while GPU encoding focuses on speed. Based on our test, HandBrake can do 2-pass 1080p encoding of DVD video with H.265 NVEnc at 500+ fps on GTX 1080. CPU encoding takes two times longer, leaving a ton of GPU power untapped in the process, but outputs file half the size. One more thing: the video codec options are limited when using HandBrake GPU acceleration.

If encoding quality is your primary concern over speed, you can stick to HandBrake CPU encoding. Sometimes the ripping-hour difference between CPU and GPU encoding is not that much. Encoding video into MP4 H.264 is a typical example. For more information, check the following test results. (Test environment ^[1])

Output Quality: HandBrake CPU vs. GPU Encoding

Q6. Use HandBrake QSV or NVEnc Acceleration?

'Which gives better quality? HandBrake QSV encoding or NVEnc acceleration? Let's assume all settings on each type of encode are of approximate same quality output.'

Answers:
It depends. GPU acceleration is realized through CUDA cores before there is a dedicated video encoding units in the graphics card. Back then, GPU was not ideal for video encoding for your final quality suffers. Now HandBrake GPU acceleration mainly uses built-in hardware encoder (i.e. Intel QSV, Nvidia NVENC, etc). Some people firmly believe that x264 > QSV > NVENC from the quality aspect. At least, we don't see any obvious difference in our test.

Multi Display Mixed Gpu Acceleration

Q7. Any Other GPU Accelerated Video Encoder Like HandBrake

'Are there any other video transcoders like Handbrake that actually has functioning GPU acceleration?'

Answers:
There are some other GPU accelerated DVD rippers and video transcoders. But most of them are paid software. Freeware that supports GPU acceleration like HandBrake includes:

• WinX DVD Ripper (It is the only one that reaches Level-3 GPU acceleration >)
• Freemake
• Staxrip

Handbrake Cli Gpu

Besides, HandBrake GPU encoding is far slower than WinX DVD Ripper (Google Chrome can make Handbrake's low-level VideoToolBox framework even slower - about 30%. So you have to shut down Chrome during its transcoding). Grappling with the one-by-one title scanning of copy protected DVDs really takes time. Well, you will just have to keep your fingers crossed for that slow process, or else you may get a crash error. Here is a speed comparison of GPU encoding to MP4 H.264 with HandBrake and WinX DVD Ripper.

Output Quality: HandBrake vs. WinX DVD Ripper

[1] Test Environment

• Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @3.70GHz
• RAM: 16 GB
• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• GPU 1: Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630
• GPU 2: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
• Source DVD: 2h 12min

Handbrake Use Gpu To Encode

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