NVENC defaulted to Main tier, whose per-level bitrate ceiling at 5K (HEVC Level 6.2
Main ≈ 240 Mbps) made initialize_encoder reject a high client bitrate; the existing
probe-and-step-down then silently dropped a ~1 Gbps request by ×¾ to ~240-320 Mbps —
visible color/motion compression on fast scenes. Set HIGH tier (≈800 Mbps for HEVC,
higher for AV1) + autoselect level so the requested bitrate goes through. `tier`/`level`
are u32 (HIGH=1, AUTOSELECT=0) shared across the HEVC/AV1 union offset; the step-down
remains as a safety net. Not yet built/validated on-box (box offline).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
enricobuehler
2a3853a5e9