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I am wondering if I get a better graphics card could it speed up h264 encoding on my machine using handbrake?

If so how can I tell what graphics card will support this?

I am aware that the GPU can do hardware decoding of h264, but am not sure about encoding.

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Related: Accelerated Video Compression – in any way, you want to have an NVIDIA card for this and be willing to spend money. – slhck Oct 3 '11 at 21:01
Another related blog post: Encode Your Videos Using Your GPU – slhck Oct 3 '11 at 21:18
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Using Handbrake the answer would be no. Handbrake is a CPU-only h.264 encoder.

The software you are actually looking for is Badaboom which can use Nvidia and Intel graphics processors to speed up the encoding process. Most GPU encoders seem to use CUDA, which is almost exclusively an Nvidia technology. The question linked by slhck mentions MediaCoder, but it requires either an Nvidia graphics card or an Intel CPU with a 2nd generation graphics core. MediaCoder is also a bit "complicated" and suffers from the curse of a thousand features...

ATi supply their own video encoder that used to be called "Avivo" but is now the AMD Codec Package which includes the AMD Video Converter and you may have some luck using it, I have no ATi/AMD card to try it with.

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So I am using an AMD CPU at the moment, does that mean this is a waste of time for me? Can it be any NVIDIA card - oh so it has to support CUDA? – peter Oct 3 '11 at 21:09
I found this link, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA which suggests that quite a lot of NVIDIA cards support CUDA. – peter Oct 3 '11 at 21:12
I've updated my answer with a link to the AMD software package that may help you use the GPU to encode video, but it requires a HD2000 series card or better. If you have a particularly powerful CPU but a budget graphics card then Handbrake may still be faster. – Mokubai Oct 3 '11 at 21:50
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