Thats hardly a quantitive measure though is it? Unless your encoding the exact same source material to the exact same end quality, how is a comparison going to be valid? I'm suggesting that to see which hardware is faster, you would ideally use the same encoder on each. In practical terms though thats probably not going to be possible since the software will be targeted specifically for the architecture of the hardware its running on. So the next best thing is simply to take the same source material and ensure you are using the same quality settings to encode it.
Two different versions of x264 (e.g. I've just compared builds 1130 and 1173*), given the same input file and using the same encoder settings, will not necessarily produce the same file. So, you are then in "what does it mean when I say the image quality is the same?" territory. That's a very taxing question, to which PSNR and SSIM are no answer. Jawed * - 1173 is the last generally available build of x264 before the changes in defaults and introduction of presets+profiles. 1173 was built just before the end of June and 1130 dates from March-ish.
Moved onto the i7, decoded the AVI to uncompressed YV12 (ie the same pixel format as the final encode) all in an effort to eliminate any decoding overhead. Frame rate from a 720p60 stream is now a very respectable 30fps. I'll see if there are any other tricks I can use to beef that up. CPU usage on the i7 is about 7%, and it was about 33% on the Penryn laptop. This disparity is probably down to the decoding. Using multiple slices gives me an FPS boost (this is where the picture is literally divided into four slices encoded/decoded in parallel). I can up motion detection quality from the default 88 to 100 and still get up to 32fps.
I get 1080p encoding at around 20-24fps. Weirdly - and rather disturbingly - the quality settings don't appear to impact performance that much.
The article said they weren't doing that somewhere? How else would it be a comparison, if these things weren't considered?
According to CodecSys' press release... Perhaps you should test it at low bitrate to see what the fuzz is all about. Since they are positioning this as a "real-time" encoder, the CodecSys' algorithm + single pass may be more suitable for their needs. We have other free/affordable solutions for 2-pass encoding anyway. Also, are you testing the free trial professional edition or the consumer version ? Is it gimped in anyway compared to the full professional version ? EDIT: Found Professional vs Personal edition comparison here: http://codecsys.fixstars.com/en/ce10/specs.html The free trial version provides full functionality. The Professional version supports up to 150Mbps encoding. Does it still encode at 20-24fps for 1080p, 150Mbps ?
Word from my mate who's trying this, it was encoding VOB's ripped from DVDs at the same speed as his dual-core Pentium. It certainly wasn't churning out h.264 encodes at a rate of knots. I should get to see it first hand tomorrow.
Copy the VOB from DVD to HDD and try. Also, if the ripping does not involve re-encoding, it may not exercise H.264 encoding (for the Pentium case). What was the final output ?
DVD doesn't use H.264, so it's up to the ripping + transcoding software's configuration. Check it ! ^_^
Now you've confused me! I thought that was the whole point. Here is a video feed in goodness knows whatever format it is in. CE-10 turns the video feed into h.264 to view on h.264 devices. Now I think about it, is the bottleneck here the decoding on the PC? It's decoding the MPEG into a video feed that CE-10 encodes to h.264, so no matter how fast CE-10 may be at shrinking that to PSP resolution, say, it'll always run at PC speed. Whereas if the source was a BRD already in h.264, CE-10 could shrink it to a small PSP sized movie very quickly. What happens to the VOB data? Is that passed bytewise to the PS3 to decode and encode, or is it decoded on the PC and that data passed for encoding? Coming from 2D image manipulation, this is all voodoo to me! Load in picture. Save as other format. Easy as pie! Mostly because every application suuports nigh on every format.
Ha ha... what I meant was DVD uses MPEG2. I don't know if the PC ripping software transcodes the video into H.264 at all (or may be it transcode it into something else). CE-10 will transcode it into H.264 (because it's the only thing it knows). If PC is the bottleneck, then it may not be CPU bound because grandmaster tried it on 2 laptops with different CPUs.
If true, the point to CE-10 seems kinda negligable. It's okay if you're mastering digital srouces, but for ripping DVDs and such, if the decoding is done on the PC, you're still going to be running very slow. I expected it'd allow you to rip video media and scale it for different storage and displays, and to do all this quickly using the SPEs.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but isn't the point of this application to use a PS3 to accelerate the encode process and all the testing so far has been without the use of a PS3?
*Shrug* I don't know. According to the results here, the encoding duration changes depending on the bitrate: http://codecsys.fixstars.com/en/ce10/gallery.html. The decoding time on PC may depend on movie content. But yes, something like SPE/SPUREngine should help more. EDIT: Ah... I see what grandmaster was testing now. His result does not include decoding an MPEG 2 stream on i7 though (Uncompressed input took 7% of i7 ?).
Anyone testing with lower than 3Mbps and higher than 15Mbps encodes ? Those are the cases where CodecSys' algorithm kicks in (or shines). Otherwise, I suspect it's "standard" SPU stuff.
I got to see this yesterday. Overall impression - what's the point? We tried an SDTV h.264 video from a camcorder and encoded it via CE-10. It ran a little slower than realtime. We tried several options, and all were the same uniform speed. By comparison, the dual core AMD running Handbrake was only a little slower. So CE-10's not an insanely fast encoder by any stretch. Perhaps it can encode full HD faster than any other options, but that's not what most people want. If it can't shrink movie rips any faster than a PC, why bother?