I don't know if this is the place to ask, it's a bit of a hybrid video/IT/developer question, so my apologies if it is not. I scoured the entire internet and can't find an answer to this question!
I'm re-encoding a bunch of videos, and I don't want to lose too much quality, but I don't want it to take three years. I'm avoiding traditional GPU “hardware encoding”, as that always has quality trade-offs for the purpose of being real-time for live streaming and such.
Then I got to thinking: “Couldn't you just offload some of the software encoding tasks to CUDA or OpenCL to speed them up? But still not really be 'hardware encoding' per se?”, so I did some digging and ended up with a VAAPI encoder which is going 8x as fast as straight CPU encoding, which is great — my question though, is, is it doing the same traditional “hardware encoding” which is going to bring quality issues? Or is it in fact doing what I describe above and just using the GPU as a co-processor of sorts?