Monday, September 29, 2008

AMD Phenom 9850 and XVid Encoding

So I've been using my new AMD Phenom 9850 quad-core CPU to do a bunch of FRAPS conversions to XVid. The source video is typically 1576x984 (not quite 1680x1050) at 30fps. The output is 1280x720p, XVid format, at around 2.8Mbps with 160Kbps MP3 audio. I'm doing 2-pass encoding for the XVid, which gives superior results over a single-pass style.

Unfortunately, Virtual Dub won't use (currently) more then 2 CPUs, so the Phenom ends up a bit underutilized. So the CPU utilization is only around 50-55% during the first pass and 60-65% during the second pass. (A value of 100% would be running all 4 cores at full utilization. So the 2nd pass is using almost 3 cores.) But since the Phenom 9850 is the 2.5GHz CPU, it's at least doing a passable job at getting the encoding done quickly.

Source video - 30m 59s
Pass 1 - finished in 46 minutes (1.5x more then real-time)
Pass 2 -

So for every minute of source material, I need

Labels: 2008, FRAPS, VideoEncoding, XVid

posted by Wuphon's at 1:34 PM