[FFmpeg-user] Trouble-shooting "The hardware encoder may be busy, or not supported"

[Media Mouth]

> On Apr 25, 2023, at 08:14, Carl Zwanzig <cpz at tuunq.com> wrote:
> 
> On 4/24/2023 8:38 PM, Media Mouth wrote:
>> Trying to make use of '-vcodec h264_videotoolbox'.  I've used it on a lot
>> of different machines, but am currently working on a system that's giving
>> the error 'hardware encoder may be busy, or not supported'.
> Does MacOS have a way to see per-process GPU utilization? That should lead to the culprit (windoze does, I use it occasionally).
> 

Hi Carl,

MacOS has an App "Activity Monitor" which lists GPU usage per process, but that's (The GPU columns) a newer development.

This older machine (MacOS Mojave) has no ability to add the GPU columns (at least none that I'm aware of. Perhaps there's some way of unlocking it?  Who knows.)

It's not like this older version Activity Monitor is completely unaware of GPU.  There's a an option to "View GPU History" which has a window that shows a graph of usage.
There's no per-process breakout, but it does represent the two "AMD Radeon HD - FirePro D500" cards on this particular machine, one seeing a bit of usage, the other showing no usage.

Is there by chance a way to tell FFmpeg choose one or another GPU card?