Render quality, formats and encoders

Preview quality and final render quality are separate systems. Lowering Preview quality can make editing and playback more responsive, but it does not force the final output to use that lower quality.

Quality presets

Yrendr exposes four video quality presets.

Draft

Draft uses a 50% internal render scale. It is useful for quick checks when speed matters more than final detail.

Standard

Standard uses a 75% internal render scale. It keeps more detail than Draft while reducing the amount of frame processing required before encoding.

High

High renders at the full requested output resolution and uses the balanced high-quality encode profile. This is the normal choice for a finished video render.

Maximum

Maximum also renders at full output resolution, but uses the highest encode-quality target offered by the current pipeline. It is intended for cases where output quality matters more than render time or file size.

Video formats

The Render window supports MP4, MOV, MKV and WebM. MP4, MOV and MKV use H.264 video in different containers. WebM finalizes the output as VP9 video with Opus audio.

H.264 encoder choices

For the H.264 render path, Yrendr can use CPU or supported hardware encoders:

• Auto - tries supported hardware encoders first and safely falls back to CPU when they cannot be used.
• CPU - uses FFmpeg libx264 and works without a supported GPU encoder.
• NVIDIA - uses H.264 through NVENC when FFmpeg and the installed driver can initialize it.
• AMD - uses H.264 through AMF when available.
• Intel - uses H.264 through Quick Sync Video when available.

NVIDIA, AMD and Intel remain selectable on supported desktop builds even when FFmpeg does not advertise the matching encoder. If the requested hardware encoder is unavailable or fails its initialization test, Yrendr falls back to CPU encoding instead of failing the render immediately.

How hardware encoding is checked

Yrendr does not assume that an encoder works just because its name appears in FFmpeg. Before using a selected hardware path, the exporter performs a small encoder test. This catches common driver, device and FFmpeg-build problems early.

If the test succeeds, rendering continues with that hardware encoder. If it fails, Yrendr reports the fallback and uses CPU H.264 when possible.

CPU versus hardware quality controls

CPU H.264 uses the quality preset to select libx264 CRF and preset values. Hardware encoders use a bitrate target calculated from output dimensions, frame rate and the selected quality level.

Audio-only formats

WAV, MP3, FLAC, M4A, OGG and Opus are available for audio-only output. Video encoder selection is irrelevant in audio-only mode because the visual render stage is skipped.

What an encoder does not speed up

A GPU video encoder only handles part of the video pipeline. Source decoding, plugin processing, transformations, compositing, generators, shadows and much of the audio pipeline may still use CPU time. Use Render Profiler with F7 when you need to know which part of a render is actually expensive.