Performance - Video Transcoding

Multi-threaded Video Transcoding

x.264 is a free library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams. Encoding/transcoding to that format is one of the most intensive tasks a processor can perform and needs to access system memory to do so.

We encode a h.264 Dolby Digital 1080P trailer of 150 MB to Matroska x.264 with 5.1 channels AC3. This software is a perfect benchmark for CPU and memory testing as it is very sensitive to multiple cores and memory frequency. The displayed number is the number of frames rendered per second averaged out over the encoding process. The higher the number, the faster the performance is.

The irony here was that 16Gb performed a little better then 32GB. And yeah, the memory frequency definitely had an effect on overall performance.

Transcoding with MediaShow Espresso

MediaShow Espresso then. The fun thing about this video transcoder is that it can utilize the GPU to assist it with the transcoding process. However, you can also solely use the CPU, making this a very interesting benchmark as you can check out behavior of CPU transcoding AND GPU transcoding all in one test.

Here the numbers are normalized a little to scale, from 1866Mhz up-to 2133 MHz the number of seconds needed to finish the transcoding job simply sat at 53 seconds. The same memory at 1333 MHz however was 2 seconds slower.