A GPU with a built-in hardware video encoder/decoder is strongly recommended
because it will significantly speed up transcoding and it will be difficult to
compete for work in the marketplace without one. Transcoding capacity will scale
with the number of GPUs available.Currently, livepeer only supports Nvidia GPUs with
NVENC (hardware video encoder) and NVDEC (hardware video decoder) support.
For a list of of GPUs that have been tested and that are known to be supported
by livepeer, see this page.
CPU transcoding using a software video encoder/decoder is possible, but not
recommended due to its significant speed disadvantage relative to GPU
transcoding. If you choose to do CPU transcoding (perhaps to try things out or
as a temporary measure until a GPU is available), generally a CPU with more
cores will improve transcoding speed.