Request Separate Controls for Transcoding and Download / syn

[tdiguy 99]

Maybe I am just a bit of a control freak on this one. However it would be nice to have more granular control in this manner. Right now when it comes to download / syn it uses the setting in the transcoding section when it comes to using hardware acceleration or not.

I would prefer to treat live tv and conversion jobs differently. For conversions i would prefer to not use hardware encoding but for live tv i would prefer to use hardware decoding and encoding.

 

i suppose to better explain myself. I would like to see basically another copy of the transcoding page as a tab in download / syn or incorporated into the settings tab on download and syn. So that for example if i wanted to use hardware acceleration on live tv but yet wanted to only use cpu capabilities for syn jobs i would have that granular control.

Edited January 5, 2018 by tdiguy

[tdiguy 99]

I see now that some of this seems to be in place. There is now a control just for how many threads will be used in converting things under download /syn / settings.

Not sure if this was always there since I only recently discovered the conversion option which is very nice and saves me some work to make more of my library device friendly. 

It would be very nice to also have controls in that same area to enable or disable hardware acceleration. 

Just from my own experience hardware acceleration ( at least vaapi ) seems to work just fine for live tv, but seems to be problematic for converting recordings.

I cant explain this other that what i have experienced where i can watch live tv programs just fine but if i record them and then try to use vaapi acceleration to convert a recording it does not always work well, i suspect its related to commercials myself.

 

Personally i figure a checkbox that would say something like "Use hardware acceleration settings under Transcoding section" might cover it since its unlikely someone would even be able to use different hardware acceleration types on the same server. 

 

As always i welcome feedback.

[Luke 42077]

Yes it's a good idea.

[zaHrecsohbiw 14]

Reviving this 7-year-old thread from the grave; I think that this is a very sensible feature request. Considering that software transcoding tends to produce better results than fixed-function hardware, I think it makes sense to have the option to configure conversions separate from real-time transcoding. I would prefer to use hardware transcoding on a normal basis, but with the ability to have automated conversions use software transcoding, in order to minimize quality loss. 

I suppose this also means that it would be nice to have, perhaps, a per-media flag to bypass hardware decoding, or maybe a per-session flag in the media player itself?

[Luke 42077]

18 hours ago, zaHrecsohbiw said:

Reviving this 7-year-old thread from the grave; I think that this is a very sensible feature request. Considering that software transcoding tends to produce better results than fixed-function hardware, I think it makes sense to have the option to configure conversions separate from real-time transcoding. I would prefer to use hardware transcoding on a normal basis, but with the ability to have automated conversions use software transcoding, in order to minimize quality loss. 

I suppose this also means that it would be nice to have, perhaps, a per-media flag to bypass hardware decoding, or maybe a per-session flag in the media player itself?

Hi, yes that all makes sense. Thanks.

[rechigo 364]

I would love to be able to force CPU encoding for conversions.

Hardware transcoding is great for handling multiple real-time streams with low latency, but is not ideal when it comes to archival purposes.

cpu-based encoding for conversions is preferrable (for those with the resources to handle it) as it offers better bitrate efficiency and overall more consistent, higher quality encodes. 

Especially when encoding to lower bitrates, there is a noticeable increase in quality when using software/cpu based decoding&encoding.

[Luke 42077]

On 1/30/2026 at 3:56 PM, rechigo said:

I would love to be able to force CPU encoding for conversions.

Hi, yes this is a reasonable thing to add options for.