multicore video compression software

widowmaker · Post by **widowmaker** » Mon Sep 15, 2008 6:02 pm

I've been using VirtualDub for a while now and I like its straight-forward ease of use. I am wondering if there are any other programs out there that you guys know about that make use of multicore systems. I want to be able to compress video in XVID, adjust audio volume, and sync audio to the video all at once. Currently I'm recording my raw videos with Fraps. Anyone have any thoughts?

Vicotnik · Post by **Vicotnik** » Mon Sep 15, 2008 8:42 pm

Isn't VirtualdubMod multithreaded? I seem to recall my XviD encodes becoming much faster when I first went dual core a while back. I used the GordianKnot package, which uses VirtualdubMod.

sjoukew · Post by **sjoukew** » Tue Sep 16, 2008 12:01 pm

I thought that it had more to do with the encoder software than the surrounding container software like virtualdub.
Xvid is multithreaded, so using xivd should do the trick. Also a lot of mpeg2 codecs are threaded so those should be OK too.

FartingBob · Post by **FartingBob** » Tue Sep 16, 2008 1:40 pm

Pretty much all encoders are multithreaded (the good ones will allow as many threads as you can throw at it, since video encoding is ideal for multithreading).
Virtualdubmod i found was pretty good for encoding fraps videos (many programs dont recognise the fraps format), although its been a while since i tried encoding one, so manybe other programs have added support for it.

widowmaker · Post by **widowmaker** » Tue Sep 16, 2008 5:24 pm

I'm aware that most apps are multithreaded, but do they make use of a multicore system? My task manager shows 50% cpu usage while encoding to xvid. Am I doing something wrong? I am using virtualdubmod from http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/ and here is what I see when encoding http://i128.photobucket.com/albums/p179 ... tled-8.jpg I'm using an Athlon X2 6400+

Incase anyone is into racing games, here's what I was encoding http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTZIKfbGkeo

Vicotnik · Post by **Vicotnik** » Tue Sep 16, 2008 5:34 pm

Could the system be bottlenecked in some other way? How's the disk activity?

widowmaker · Post by **widowmaker** » Tue Sep 16, 2008 5:39 pm

I don't see how. The maximum disk activity should be from recording with fraps, but that's fine. I have a dedicated hard drive to record raw videos. When I encode, virtualdub reads the video from that hard drive and saves the resulting encoded video to another hard drive.

FartingBob · Post by **FartingBob** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 2:13 am

Strange CPU usage. Its working on both cores, but not to their full capacity? As you said HDDs wont bottleneck things, the amount of data being written is quite low and spread over a long time.
Try stressing the CPU with something like Orthos. Also monitor your CPU temps, maybe its been thermally throttled.

widowmaker · Post by **widowmaker** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 6:24 am

Thanks for everyone's input. I've done many stress tests before and they all work as they should. I did another orthos test again anyways and see that both cores are used 100%. My cpu temp under load is 50C so I don't think that's an issue. I don't see what could possibly be causing this problem other than virtualdub itself. As sjoukew said, it has more to do with the codec however from what I gather xvid is capable of making use of multicore systems. o_O