My understanding is that all of the codecs we are discussing are deterministic. If you have evidence to the contrary I’d love to see it.

You can boot from USB with UEFI, that’s not a showstopper. Unless I’m missing something?

It’s still a bad idea. If they have some really nasty malware installed it could rootkit your device, and vice versa - and you never really know. Just build a small portable computer (eg. Raspberry pi, NUC, etc) and use their KB/mouse/display.

Other peeps are saying just connect to a remote desktop you have hosted somewhere using your friend’s PC - don’t do that, you can’t trust their software/hardware.

I laughed at the word ‘fastness’, but then realised it’s a lot safer than offering ‘speed’ on the internet lol

Yeah that caught my eye too, seems odd. Most compression/encoding schemes benefit from a large dictionary but I don’t think it would be constrained by the sometimes lesser total RAM on a GPU than the main system - in most cases that would make the dictionary larger than the video file. I’m curious.