… for Codecs & Media

Tip #1190: Faster H.264 and HEVC Compression

Larry Jordan – LarryJordan.com

Compression is getting faster due to new chips supporting hardware acceleration.

As I was preparing this week’s webinar on media compression in Apple Compressor (link) I learned the following:

The new M1 chip from Apple (part of the three new Macs launched last week) can accelerate encoding of H.264, 8-bit HEVC, and 10-bit HEVC using hardware. This vastly speeds compression of these codecs.

NOTE: HDR media requires using a 10-bit codec, which is why compressing 10-bit HEVC quickly is important.

To enable hardware acceleration, be sure to select Faster for the Encoding type.

As well, recent Intel-based Mac computers can use the T2 chip to hardware accelerate 8-bit HEVC and 10-bit HEVC encoding. Again, the Faster Encoding type option should be selected.

NOTE: Selecting Multi-pass switches to software-based encoding. Given the speed and quality of today’s hardware-accelerated compression, there are very few reasons to use this option.