- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
vt-enc is a bash script that simplifies the process of encoding videos with FFmpeg using Apple’s VideoToolbox framework on macOS. It provides an easy-to-use command-line interface for encoding videos with various options, including codec selection, quality settings, and scaling.
But ffmpeg works fine on other platforms without VideoToolbox. So why do I need VT for vt-enc? Wouldn’t it work just fine on other platforms as long as ffmpeg is available?
You need VideoToolbox for this particular tool because it calls the VideoToolbox library from within FFmpeg in order to encode the video.
“Why do I need x264 to encode H.264 in FFmpeg?” is essentially what you’re asking. FFmpeg needs VideoToolbox support to work with my tool.
If you’re asking why I chose to use VideoToolbox in the first place, it was because I want this to be a macOS-specific tool with very fast encoding speeds at decent fidelity per bit. Hardware accelerated video encoding is one way to make this happen.