GPU-accelerated video processing with ffmpeg

Question

I want to use ffmpeg to accelerate video encode and decode with an NVIDIA GPU.

From NVIDIA's website:

NVIDIA GPUs contain one or more hardware-based decoder and encoder(s) (separate from the CUDA cores) which provides fully-accelerated hardware-based video decoding and encoding for several popular codecs. With decoding/encoding offloaded, the graphics engine and the CPU are free for other operations.

My question is: can I use CUDA cores to encode and decode video, maybe faster?

Answer 1

FFmpeg provides a subsystem for hardware acceleration, which includes NVIDIA: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro

In order to enable support for GPU-assisted encoding with an NVIDIA GPU, you need:

• A ​supported GPU
• Supported drivers for your operating system
• The NVIDIA Codec SDK
• ffmpeg configured with --enable-nvenc (default if the drivers are detected while configuring)

Answer 2

Quick use on ​supported GPU:

CUDA

ffmpeg -hwaccel cuda -i input output 

CUVID

ffmpeg -c:v h264_cuvid -i input output 

Full hardware transcode with NVDEC and NVENC:

ffmpeg -hwaccel cuda -hwaccel_output_format cuda -i input -c:v h264_nvenc -preset slow output 

If ffmpeg was compiled with support for libnpp, it can be used to insert a GPU based scaler into the chain:

ffmpeg -hwaccel_device 0 -hwaccel cuda -i input -vf scale_npp=-1:720 -c:v h264_nvenc -preset slow output.mkv 

Source: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro