Best Handbrake alternative to encode H.265 with Nvidia GPU acceleration Here, we introduce EaseFab Video Converter (available for Windows and Mac users) to you. Serving as the best alternative to Handbrake, it can solve all of Handbrake H.265 encoding & decoding problems. Aug 18, 2014 Handbrake is just a GUI for the command line encoder x264. X264 is a software encoder that can offload a small component of its workload to the GPU for a small overall performance improvement. The Most of people who want to encode video to H.265 will choose to use Handbrake because HandBrake 0.10 and higher version like the latest Handbrake 1.0.7 have been added support for H.265 encoding. But what about the performance of Handbrake HEVC encoding? A: NO, QuickSync is the hardware acceleration for Intel iGPU, not the generic term for GPU video hardware acceleration. AMD GPU use UVD (Unified Video Decoder) for decoding, and VCE (Video Coding Engine) for encoding. All this will be controlled by VideoToolBox automatically in macOS, virtually transparent to users. A GPU-accelerated ripper with the handy ability to set the number of CPU cores it uses, WinX DVD Ripper can rip your DVD to a file in around five minutes at full speed. Using it is as simple as loading the disk, selecting the output folder, and pressing the big, blue 'Run' button.

News: GPU acceleration of Nvidia NVENC and AMD VCE has been added to HandBrake 1.2.0

Video transcoding used to be a CPU intensive and time-consuming process. Now because of the dramatic increase of generic compute blocks and the improvement of discrete GPU video codec SDK, hardware based video encoding is possible, faster than ever.

HandBrake also adds GPU acceleration support little by little, which however leads to a few questions that continue to puzzle some of you, like No NVENC in HandBrake, how to enable HandBrake GPU acceleration, etc. We sort out those frequently asked questions about HandBrake GPU accelerated (x265) video encoding and list the answers for you here.

HandBrake Still Runs Slow? HandBrake Alternative Could Speed up DVD/Video Conversion

WinXDVD offers the best Handbrake alternative for both DVD ripping and video conversion, achieving up to 5 times faster speed than Handbrake with full GPU acceleration powered by Intel QSV, NVIDIA (NVENC/CUDA), and AMD graphics.

WinX DVD Ripper - Fast rip both homemade and protected DVD to MP4 H.264/H.265. Backup DVD in 5 minutes.
WinX Video Converter - GPU Accelerated 4K UHD Video Converter for converting, compressing and editing 4K/HD videos.

Top 6 Frequently Asked Questions for Handbrake GPU Acceleration

• Q1: No NVENC or CUDA in HandBrake?
• Q2: Why Handbrake GPU is using 100% CPU?
• Q3: Can HandBrake GPU acceleration Be Applied in macOS, Windows or Linux?
• Q4: How to Enable GPU Based Encoding in Handbrake?
• Q5: HandBrake CPU or GPU Encoding, Which Is Better?
• Q6: Use HandBrake Intel QSV or NVEnc Acceleration?
• Q7: Any Other GPU Accelerated Video Encoder Like HandBrake?

Q1. No NVENC or CUDA in HandBrake?

'Does HandBrake use GPU acceleration? Why are there no NVENC or CUDA hardware-accelerated encoding options in HandBrake?'

Answers:
1. You are using an old version HandBrake. Upgrading to HandBrake 1.2.0 or above may solve the problem. HandBrake 1.1.2 and before only supports Intel QSV. The version 1.2.0 released in Dec. 22, 2018 already added the support for GPU video encoding with Intel QuickSync, Nvidia NVEnc, and AMD VCE. Check Handbrake tutorial here >>

Note: It is reported that Google Chrome will slow down the low-level VideoToolBox framework (Quick Sync Video acceleration tech). This has caused 30% speed loss using Handbrake with Chrome running in the background compared to Safari. If you see the slow downs, you can: 1, close Chrome; 2, disable Handbrake QuickSync; 3, try another free GPU accelerated video encoder like WinX DVD Ripper.

2. Check if your Nvidia GPU supports NVENC or not.

• Go to the List of Nvidia graphics processing units Wikipedia page.
• Ctrl + F and put in your graphics card exact name.
• Then get the corresponding Code name. GPUs in code name staring with GK, GM and GP support NVENC technology, while others do not.

3. Install, reinstall or update your Nvidia graphics card driver.

4. Suppose that you are running, for example an MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X GPU, NVENC should be available. And other programs such as DVDFab or WinX DVD Ripper do allow GPU accelerated video encoding, but HandBrake still doesn't have the option. Try to reboot your computer, download a new setup file from HandBrake official website, and then uninstall and reinstall the freeware to give it one last shot.

Q2. Why Handbrake GPU Encoding is using 100% CPU?

Handbrake Amd Gpu

'I was trying to use ENEnc to encode but find that it barely utilizes my GPU.The encoding FPS is also very slow: it's only about ~75fps, while I should be able to achieve ~420 fps using a tool called NVEncC. Also, the CPU was also constantly 100% during encoding, makes me suspect somewhere else in HB's workflow was neckbottled.'

Some users may believe that as Handbrake supports GPU encoding, it should use only a tiny part of CPU and rely most tasks to the GPU. In fact, except the video encoding, other tasks such as the decoding, muxing, filters, etc. are performed by the CPU. So it's normally to see high and even 100% CPU usage during Handbrake GPU encoding.

This is why the Level-3 Hardware Acceleration can deliver a much faster speed. This tech can apply GPU hardware acceleration during the decoding, video processing, and encoding, pushing the whole task by about 5x faster than Handbrake. By far, WinX DVD Ripper is the only free DVD ripper that comes with this function.

For Windows and Mac only. If you are a mobile user, please click here

Q3. Can HandBrake GPU acceleration Be Applied in macOS, Windows or Linux?

'I am uncertain if I can use handbrake on Mac to rip Blu-ray disks to drop into my iTunes library while capitalizing on my GPU.'

Answers:
1. HandBrake can be running on Linux, Mac and Windows using GPU acceleration, but there are system requirements. Processor needs to be Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD Athlon X2 or better. To be specific:

• Ubuntu: LTS versions are supported.
• Mac: macOS 10.10 Yosemite and later is required (64-bit only).
• Windows: Windows 7 SP 1 or later is required (64-bit only).

2. For your information, HandBrake can't rip Blu-ray discs for DRM reasons, let alone GPU accelerated ripping. Installing libdvdcss can solve part of the copy protection problems of DVD disc.

Q4. How to Enable GPU Based Encoding in Handbrake?

Here we take DVD transcoding as an example. Follow the next steps to configure HandBrake to use GPU acceleration.

Step 1: Go to the official HandBrake download page , download and install HandBrake (1.3.1) for Windows, Mac OS or Linux.

Step 2: Download third-party libdvdcss and drag it to the HandBrake setup file directory. If you skip this step, the reading of encrypted DVDs will crash with error. You can see it from the preview window.

Step 3: Enable HandBrake GPU acceleration

• Insert your DVD disc into the drive and open HandBrake.
• Click Open Source, select the DVD option to load the content, and then switch to Video tab.
• In the Video Codec option, choose H.264 (Intel QSV), H.264 (Nvidia NVEnc), H.265 (Intel QSV) or H.265 (Nvidia NVEnc).

Step 4: Choose an output preset or set video parameters by yourself. Remember that there is a tradeoff between speed and quality/size. So make a decision based on your needs.

• CQ (19-21) is recommended and don't go above 22 RF when ripping a DVD.
• Choose Same as source for Framerate.
• Denoise NLMeans filter is very memory intensive, drastically slowing your encodes down.
• Encoder Level 6 and higher is required for 8K video encoding, while 5-5.2 for 4K video transcoding. Well, HandBrake doesn't support that.

Q5. HandBrake CPU or GPU Encoding, Which Is Better?

'Last year someone asked here if GPU encoding was worth it and was told to stick to CPU encoding. But HandBrake x265 encoding takes too long. CPU or GPU encoding, which should I use?' - from Reddit

Answers:
Generally speaking, the priority of CPU encoding is quality while GPU encoding focuses on speed. Based on our test, HandBrake can do 2-pass 1080p encoding of DVD video with H.265 NVEnc at 500+ fps on GTX 1080. CPU encoding takes two times longer, leaving a ton of GPU power untapped in the process, but outputs file half the size. One more thing: the video codec options are limited when using HandBrake GPU acceleration.

If encoding quality is your primary concern over speed, you can stick to HandBrake CPU encoding. Sometimes the ripping-hour difference between CPU and GPU encoding is not that much. Encoding video into MP4 H.264 is a typical example. For more information, check the following test results. (Test environment ^[1])

Output Quality: HandBrake CPU vs. GPU Encoding

Q6. Use HandBrake QSV or NVEnc Acceleration?

'Which gives better quality? HandBrake QSV encoding or NVEnc acceleration? Let's assume all settings on each type of encode are of approximate same quality output.' Jettison mac free.

Answers:
It depends. GPU acceleration is realized through CUDA cores before there is a dedicated video encoding units in the graphics card. Back then, GPU was not ideal for video encoding for your final quality suffers. Now HandBrake GPU acceleration mainly uses built-in hardware encoder (i.e. Intel QSV, Nvidia NVENC, etc). Some people firmly believe that x264 > QSV > NVENC from the quality aspect. At least, we don't see any obvious difference in our test.

Q7. Any Other GPU Accelerated Video Encoder Like HandBrake

'Are there any other video transcoders like Handbrake that actually has functioning GPU acceleration?'

Answers:
There are some other GPU accelerated DVD rippers and video transcoders. But most of them are paid software. Freeware that supports GPU acceleration like HandBrake includes:

• WinX DVD Ripper (It is the only one that reaches Level-3 GPU acceleration >)
• Freemake
• Staxrip

Besides, HandBrake GPU encoding is far slower than WinX DVD Ripper (Google Chrome can make Handbrake's low-level VideoToolBox framework even slower - about 30%. So you have to shut down Chrome during its transcoding). Grappling with the one-by-one title scanning of copy protected DVDs really takes time. Well, you will just have to keep your fingers crossed for that slow process, or else you may get a crash error. Here is a speed comparison of GPU encoding to MP4 H.264 with HandBrake and WinX DVD Ripper.

Handbrake Gpu Encoding Mac

Output Quality: HandBrake vs. WinX DVD Ripper

Multi Display Mixed Gpu Acceleration

[1] Test Environment

• Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @3.70GHz
• RAM: 16 GB
• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• GPU 1: Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630
• GPU 2: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
• Source DVD: 2h 12min

Free Download WinX DVD Ripper Platinum for Fast-ever DVD Ripping

WinX DVD Ripper Platinum - Rip and digitize homemade, scratched, movie DVDs / folder / ISO image and DVDs with 99 titles - the new DRM encryption adopted by Disney and other DVD distributors, bypass DVD CSS, region code, Sony ARccOS, UOPs, APS, RCE, level-3 hardware accelerated.