Hardware-accelerated transcodes with VAAPI

This one’s more of a note to myself, since I’ve been transcoding my anime library lately.

It turns out that VAAPI empowers hardware acceleration in FFmpeg. I’ve been painstakingly transcoding everything lately using my Intel’s CPU and it’s been worrying since it’s basically burning my PC for weeks now. I’ve saved around 300GB just by transcoding my old, bloated shows from h.264 to HEVC so having an accelerated process would be great.

Although of course, if there’s an increase in size, I may just keep on burning my CPU until it’s all done. Honestly, the slight increase in size and the fiddling of settings in flags in FFmpeg is enough to turn me off to just transcode things by hand.