Codecs

Alchemist targets three video codecs: AV1, HEVC, and H.264. They are not interchangeable. Pick based on storage, playback compatibility, and available hardware.

Comparison

Codec	File size	Quality efficiency	Compatibility	Encoding speed
AV1	Smallest	Best	Growing	Slowest
HEVC	Smaller	Very high	Good on modern devices	Medium
H.264	Largest	Lowest of the three	Universal	Fastest

When to choose AV1

Use AV1 when saving the most space matters and your playback devices are modern enough to handle it.

Hardware support:

• NVIDIA: RTX 40 (Ada) NVENC — RTX 30 (Ampere) decodes AV1 but cannot encode it
• Intel: Arc, or integrated from Meteor Lake / Core Ultra onward (earlier iGPUs have no AV1 encoder)
• AMD: RDNA 3+ depending on driver/FFmpeg stack; HEVC/H.264 are the validated AMD paths, while AV1 remains driver/FFmpeg-stack sensitive (RDNA 2 is AV1 decode-only)
• Apple: no AV1 hardware encoder on any Mac — AV1 output uses the CPU (SVT-AV1); Apple Silicon can decode AV1 (M3+)
• CPU: always available through SVT-AV1

When to choose HEVC

Use HEVC when you want most of AV1’s storage benefit with better playback compatibility across TVs, phones, and set-top boxes.

Hardware support:

• NVIDIA: Maxwell+
• Intel: 6th gen+
• AMD: Polaris+
• Apple: M1+/T2 and newer
• CPU: x265

When to choose H.264

Use H.264 when compatibility is the priority and storage efficiency is secondary.

Hardware support:

• NVIDIA: broadly available
• Intel: broadly available
• AMD: broadly available
• Apple: broadly available
• CPU: x264

Hardware summary by vendor

Vendor	AV1	HEVC	H.264
NVIDIA	RTX 40 (Ada)	Maxwell+	Yes
Intel	Arc / Meteor Lake+	6th gen+	Yes
AMD	RDNA 3+ on compatible driver/FFmpeg stacks	Polaris+	Yes
Apple	CPU only (no HW encoder)	M1+/T2	Yes
CPU	Yes	Yes	Yes

BPP

BPP means bits per pixel. It measures how much video data is being spent per rendered pixel and frame, which makes it more useful than plain bitrate when you compare files across different resolutions and frame rates.

Typical ranges:

• > 0.15: high quality, usually still worth evaluating
• ~0.10: medium quality, often already efficient
• < 0.05: heavily compressed, likely to look blocky

Alchemist uses BPP because bitrate alone lies. A 4K file and a 1080p file can share the same bitrate and look completely different. BPP normalizes for resolution and frame rate, so the planner can skip files that are already efficiently compressed instead of re-encoding on guesswork.