VERY LIMITED hardware acceleration for rendering has been checked into GIT and a description is included below that will eventually make it into the manual. Limitations are described there and why, but here is a one line summary. *If you have an Intel computer with Intel graphics board and render to mp4, you can take advantage of this.* We have no hardware to test Intel computer with Nvidia graphics board but are assuming that it will not work. An AMD computer with the Nvidia graphics board installed does not work (not implemented). If you can prove me wrong, I would really like to hear that! The following URL, although not generic for all operating systems, does provide a Comparison tables for ascertaining whether or not the VA-API will work for your specific hardware. * Do not be fooled by the GE Force listed in the Decoding section *-- it does not appear in the Encoding section. The table is about 2/3 of the way down the article. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration @Ubuntu16 users: there is a test build at: https://www.cinelerra-gg.org/download/testing/cinelerra-5.1-ub16-x86_64-stat... @Pierre: if someone lets us know that it works on an Intel computer with Nvidia graphics, gg will make a Mint18 build but otherwise prepare to be disappointed. :) @Andrea: we did look a little bit at OpenCL but got the impression that the overhead may be too much and that it it seems to only help with filters. @Andrew: thanks for your last email on this subject as it provided the useful vdpauinfo amongst other things. ----------------------------------------------------------- *Rendering with Hardware Acceleration / Encoding using VA-API* Encoding using hardware acceleration of your graphics board GPU is included in CinelerraGG but it is of limited availability and may be exclusive to only a particular set of hardware graphics boards and only with certain ffmpeg formats. The encoding is done via vaapi (libva installed), which is known to work with Intel HD graphics board and some others. Usage of encoding as developed by Nvidia is not included with CinGG because ffmpeg has to be compiled with the *non-free *option and that goes against GPL. In addition the Nvidia encoding, referred to as *nvenc, *requires proprietary libraries to be installed. To use hardware acceleration for rendering (that is, encoding) you do not have to set a preference or an environment variable, as used by decoding. To use this feature you must use an ffmpeg render options file which specifies a vaapi codec, such as h264_vaapi. You must also include the line in the file to trigger the hardware probe: cin_hw_dev=vaapi There are currently 4 options files available in the Render menu already set up for you that you see when you select the Video wrench and use the down arrow on the first line in the menu. These are: h264_vaapi.mp4 # known to work on Intel computer with Intel Broadwell graphics driver mpeg2_vaapi.mp4 # known to work on Intel computer with Intel Broadwell graphics driver mjpeg_vaapi.mp4 # error message of “open failed with mjpeg_vaapi...” on above computer hevc_vaapi.mp4 # error message of “open failed with hevc_vaapi...” on above computer Other option files can be added as needed for your specific hardware if it is known to work for you, such as VP8 and VP9. The contents of the included cinelerra’s ffmpeg/video/h264_vaapi.mp4 file: mp4 h264_vaapi cin_hw_dev=vaapi profile=high According to an online wiki, hardware encoders usually create output of lower quality than some software encoders like x264, but are much faster and use less CPU. Keep this in mind as you might want to set a higher bitrate to get output of similar visual quality. Results of a particular test case performed on a Intel, 4-core computer, with Broadwell Graphics using an mp4 input video/audio file with dimensions of 1440x1080 / 29.97fps is shown next (note, tutorial.mp4). This may very well be a “best case” scenario! But clearly, at least on this computer with only 4 cores, the hardware acceleration seems to be advantageous. A comparison of the 2 output files using ydiff (as described in Appendix C in the manual) shows no obvious defects. *CPU usage* *Render Time* *Output File Size* *Options File* Without Hardware Acceleration 388% 100 secs. 36,862,542 h264.mp4 With vaapi Harware Acceleration 150% 19 secs. 74,522,736 h264_vaapi.mp4