Simple trancoding (use GPUs ?)

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
1

I have a lot of movies, but some of them need to be transcoded.
But my CPU (intel Core 2 Duo E6850 ) is old and sometimes I cannot transcode 1 stream 1080p …
To store all my movie I use Amazon Drive (5To).

I want to keep all track and subtitles in the movie, most of the time i watch movie on chromecast, Android App or web player.
Some times I have movie in 10 bit
I don’t want to loose any quality in the transcoding process.
First question is if i use this command
ffmpeg -i file.mkv -vcodec h264 -strict 2 out.mkv
would this be lostless ???

Second question I have a R9 280X can it be use to speed up the transcoding process ???

2

Good question, but depends on your server hardware and O/S.

For example, I use Freenas with Plex server plugin 1.5.5. That’s a BDS Unix O/S and it identifies the graphics card I have on the server, but always complains about CPU to me when Plex’s awful implementation of forced transcoding hits. That’s a different conversation but suffice to say Plex staff points to Microsoft as the problem, but VLC team laughs and shakes their head at Plex.

To the point, I’m not sure you can “make” the server use the graphics card for transcoding.