Friday, September 30, 2016

How to Enable Intel QuickSync in Handbrake

I have a Windows 10 PC with an Intel Core i5-6600 Skylake processor. I noticed in Handbrake that it said QuickSync was not enabled, and not supported. I realized that this was probably a driver issue. Since I have an Nvidia GTX 970 graphics card installed, my Intel integrated graphics had never had its driver installed. Here's how I resolved this.

How-To

  1. Reboot the PC and enter the bios (mash your delete key repeatedly before Windows starts loading).
  2. Find the place in your bios where you can enabled your integrated graphics and discrete/PCIe graphics to run at the same time. I have an Asus motherboard, and it was actually hard to find. I finally located it under a menu called "System Agent." Use your best judgment when tweaking the bios. You can always go back and load the defaults if something doesn't work. Ultimately, refer to your motherboard's manual.
  3. Save your bios settings and boot back into Windows. Wait for Windows 10 to detect the integrated graphics and automatically install the Intel drivers.
  4. After install is complete, open Handbrake. The warning about Intel QuickSync being unsupported is now gone and replaced by an option to disable QuickSync.

Why

Why enable QuickSync in Handbrake? I encode my video files in HEVC (aka h.265, x265). When I was doing my encoding without QuickSync, my encoding speed was under 10fps. After enabling QuickSync, my encoding speed was over 20fps, sometimes reaching over 40fps. That is a huge performance boost and a big time saver.

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