Differences in various ffmpeg h264 encoders

Can anybody explain to me the differences in these h264 ffmpeg encoders? Does any of them use GPU accelerated compression?

 V..... libx264              libx264 H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10 (codec h264)
 V..... libx264rgb           libx264 H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10 RGB (codec h264)
 V..... h264_v4l2m2m         V4L2 mem2mem H.264 encoder wrapper (codec h264)
 V..... h264_vaapi           H.264/AVC (VAAPI) (codec h264)

Peter R.

Posted 2019-09-17T14:01:50.120

Reputation: 5

If you want GPU acceleration then you'll want the -hwaccel switch combined with relevant hardware encoder (nvenc or so on) that you have in your system: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro

– Mokubai – 2019-09-17T14:25:53.900

Answers

libx264 → Open source software encoder. This one is the best, but not usually the fastest.
libx264rgb → A patched version of libx264 that outputs RGB instead of YUV. This format is not commonly supported by decoders.
h264_v4l2m2m → Uses whatever video encoder Video4Linux decides to use. This can vary between distros and hardware. (I think, I don't have much experience with this one.)
h264_vaapi → Intel H.264 decoder

szatmary

Posted 2019-09-17T14:01:50.120

Reputation: 2 181

Thank you for clarification :). – Peter R. – 2019-09-18T06:16:47.600