A system includes a processing device to receive a video content, a quality metric, and a target bit rate for encoding the video content. The system includes encoding hardware to perform frame encoding on the video content and a controller coupled between the processing device and the encoding hardware. The controller is programmed with machine instructions to generate first QP values on a per-frame basis using a frame machine learning model with a first plurality of weights. The first plurality of weights depends at least in part on the quality metric and the target bit rate. The controller is further programmed to provide the first QP values to the encoding hardware for rate control of the frame encoding.