GPU Accelerated Video Encoding with ffmpeg using CUDA on AWS

Video encoding with ffmpeg on an Nvidia GPU using can be extremely fast compared to software based encoding on the CPU.

Example command: ffmpeg -y -vsync 0 -hwaccel cuda -hwaccel_output_format cuda -extra_hw_frames 4 -i input.mp4 -c:a copy -c:v h264_nvenc -b:v 5M output3.mp4

This results in a transcoding speed of 14.7x!

On AWS instance type g4dn.xlarge ffmpeg fails unless the option -extra_hw_frames 4 is added.