Video content distributed to viewers is often transcoded into several adaptive bit rate (ABR) profiles for delivery. Live streaming will drive overall video data traffic growth for both cellular and Wi-Fi as consumers move beyond watching on-demand video to viewing live streams. All social media applications now include the feature on their respective platforms. Consumer behavior has evolved, evident in the trends of OTT video subscription and the rapid uptake of live streaming. The processing demands from high quality video applications have pushed limits for broadcast and telecommunication networks. As of July 2019 Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Volta and Turing generation GPUs support hardware encoding, and Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Volta and Turing generation GPUs support hardware decoding. If your input has a bit rate of up to 65,000 kBit/s, chances are it'll still look pretty good after conversion though.All NVIDIA GPUs starting with the Kepler generation support fully-accelerated hardware video encoding, and all GPUs starting with Fermi generation support fully-accelerated hardware video decoding. The default value here is 23, while values between 18 and 28 are considered sane. Try setting the -crf option to influence the constant quality parameter. Of course, reencoding the video will degrade its quality to some extent, given that you're applying a lossy conversion again. MediaInfo can also help you analyze container and codec details.

You can check this while encoding, where x264 says something like: profile High, level 4.0

The output will have the correct profile and level set in its metadata.

Here we've just copied the audio stream since it won't be affected. -level:v – as defined in Annex A of the H.264 standard, e.g., 4.0.įor example: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -profile:v high -level:v 4.0 -c:a copy output.mp4.-profile:v – one of high, main, or baseline (and others, but this is irrelevant here).When encoding with libx264, you can set the H.264 profile and level with:

Ffmpeg x264