Well, good news - I got some pointers on places that genAI usually makes mistakes, so I’ve gone through a round of performance fixes for things like unnecessary worker duplications which - next to the actual encoding - I didn’t notice the impact of on my desktop.

As to using hardware encoding, HISTV runs a test render for hevc and h264 across amf, nvenc, and qsv - so pretty much, if your hardware supports it, HISTV will detect it and let you choose which encoder you want to use. You can even use libx264/libx265 by choice if you want to take advantage of the more efficient compression; doing so exposes a toggle for CRF if you’d rather use that than QP.