[GeneticGenesis]

Great question! The real answer is it varies, but for H.264, most just encode on software right now, because GPUs are expensive (especially in the cloud), and the failure rates are really high (if you try to build your own). ffmpeg and lib264 is really fast on modern hardware with decent X86 extensions.

It's also worth noting that YouTube also now builds its own transcoding chips [1], and AWS just launched a dedicated transcoding instances based on Xilinx chips:

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-build... [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/vt1/