Hardware Acceleration Overview

Emby supports a broad range of hardware accelerated video transcoding methods on its supported platforms:

Windows

Emby supports the following hardware acceleration variants on Windows

• Nvidia NVDEC & NVENC
  API for video encoding and decoding acceleration using Nvidia GPUs

• Intel QuickSync Video
  Intel's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core

• AMD AMF
  AMD Advanced Media Framework - multimedia API AMD hardware for real-time processing of multimedia

• Microsoft DXVA
  Microsoft DirectX Video Acceleration API - hardware independent API for hardware accelerated video decoding

Linux

Emby supports the following hardware acceleration variants on Linux

• Nvidia NVDEC & NVENC
  API for video encoding and decoding acceleration using Nvidia GPUs

• VA API]
  Video Acceleration API for Linux is supported by several device manufacturers

• Intel QuickSync Video
  Intel's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core

Android

Emby supports the following hardware acceleration variants on Android

• Android MediaCodec
  MediaCodec is Android's integrated API for video de- and endoding.

• OpenMax
  OpenMax is an API specification covering various aspects of media acceleration. On Android it is the standard API for codec implementations while applications are typically using MediaCodec

Troubleshooting

I've enabled hardware acceleration but CPU usage is still very high when transcoding and PGS or DVD subtitles are enabled.

In many cases these subtitle formats will need to be burned into the video on the fly with transcoding. Most GPU's do not support this and as a result there will be some significant CPU involvement. This is a very taxing process for even a powerful server, and it's generally something you want to avoid. Here are the best ways to avoid burning in subtitles:

• Turn off the subtitles prior to playback using the pre-playback subtitle selection menu
• Use external text-based subtitles instead, such as .srt files. Emby Server's subtitle download features can help automate the process of acquiring these.
• Use an Emby app that can direct play these subtitle formats without transcoding, such as Emby Theater, Android, or iOS.
• If you are using Windows with Remote Desktop and have trouble getting hardware acceleration please read this article.