On VAAPI vs libx264

[Ezequiel Garcia]

Currently, I am using libx264 to encode analog videos on a video server product.
I'm near the CPU limit, so I was considering switching to vaapi-based encoding.
My initial experiments were *very* promising, as my CPU went down like a sack
of potatoes

The only issue I found so far is that file size is greatly increased
(around 4 times bigger!), yet I'm unable to tune vaapih264enc
to match libx264.

Before I start diving into the encoder internals, I was wondering:

Is this an intrinsic limitaion of the hardware encoder, or should
I dig into libva parameters? For example, I haven't found a way to
change the GOP size to improve compression (while keeping quality).

Maybe we need to add extra knobs in the gstreamer frontend?

Thanks!
-- 
Ezequiel García, VanguardiaSur
www.vanguardiasur.com.ar