So now it comes down to this: which vendor's hardware encoding is going to get the best support from Avidemux (and other programs). It's very unfortunate, because I used AMD some time ago on my Macintosh systems, and they have a good reputation, and the AMD codec seems to have as many options as Nvidia: but finding out what card does what is going to be very difficult. But they don't even say which chip sets actually support hardware encoding.

I got a reply from them that says that they just supply the chip sets to other manufacturers, if you want to know if a card does hardware encoding you have to find out who makes the card and ask them. They don't have any usable information on their web site. (I'm also researching for a friend, he has a tower PC so there are more cards that will work for him, but he really had problems working with Windows 10 on his previous laptops and slates.)ĪMD is a write-off.

However, from what I've seen so far, I could buy an entire refurbished PC with Intel core i5 or i7 processor for less than what many Nvidia cards cost! The only problem is that I'd really like to remain on Windows 7 rather than 10. I'm using this to look for cards that should work in my system. Nvidia also has a web page that lists the base cards that support video encoding: Intel has a list of which processors do this.īe advised that this web page doesn't work with all browsers, but if it works it lets you search on 'Intel Quick Sync Video' (and other qualifiers). In this case, it's the actual processor that determines if it has hardware video encoding. The one system I have that has the right Intel processor is working well, though the codec is a bit limited in what options it has (compared to Nvidia and AMD).

Ffmpeg h264 codec testing