Transcoding general questions & Hardware transcoding questions

[milosz]

I am using a Windows 7 / 64 machine with an i7-4790K cpu @ 4.4 GHz, 32 GB ram and SSD for C:\ ; there is no video card, video is just the on-chip Intel HD Graphics 4600

The i7-4790k supports Intel's QuickSync hardware decode / code

I have installed Intel Media SDK 2018 R2

What version of ffmpeg.exe should I use- 64 bit or 32 bit? I currently have the 64 bit ffmpeg build date 6/5/2019 at 17:29:54 - is this correct?

When I enable either of the transcode hardware acceleration modes DECODE: Direct3D, ENCODE: Intel QuickSync or both, I get an error message from Windows "ffmpeg has stopped working" when I try to transcode anything. I can then see at least two ffmpeg processes in Windows TaskManager, each using a large amount of CPU. I have to kill those and kill and re-start Mezzmo to get things going again.

Does hardware acceleration for transcoding actually work in Mezzmo? I can't get it to work. I wonder if there is some kind of setup for ffmpeg I need to correct?

"Software" transcoding works OK but it causes something like 100% CPU activity on all eight threads, the fans spool up to keep the CPU cool- the Mezzmo server in my closet sounds like a jet engine during transcoding. Seems to me that enabling hardware transcoding would spare the machine this trauma, if it could be made to work.

[Peter]

The version of ffmpeg included with Mezzmo needs to be used as this has the libraries for Quick Sync compiled into it. Also newer versions of ffmpeg have changes to parameters that have not been accounted for in Mezzmo so this can result in unpredictable behaviour. To restore the original ffmpeg if you have overwritten them you can download the Mezzmo installer from our website and run it.

[milosz]

The version of ffmpeg included with Mezzmo needs to be used as this has the libraries for Quick Sync compiled into it. Also newer versions of ffmpeg have changes to parameters that have not been accounted for in Mezzmo so this can result in unpredictable behaviour. To restore the original ffmpeg if you have overwritten them you can download the Mezzmo installer from our website and run it.


I SEE! Well that makes perfect sense. I assumed that because there was a "Check For Updates To FFmeg" button on the TRANSCODING SETTINGS window that we'd want the latest version of FFmpeg.

[Peter]

In earlier versions of Mezzmo it was supported to use updates of ffmpeg but since we added burning subtitles and hardware transcoding this is no longer supported as other versions of ffmpeg may not have these features.