Performance Video encoding | Transcoding

Transcoding with MediaShow Espresso

We recently added another benchmark to the test-suite. It's MediaShow Espresso. The fun thing about this video transcoder is that it can utilize the GPU to assist it with the transcending process.  However, you can also solely use the CPU, making this a very interesting benchmark and you can check out behavior of CPU transcoding AND GPU transcoding all in one test.

Above you can find the results of this new test. In this test we transcode a 200 MB AVCHD 1920x1080i media file to a 1280x720P MP4 binary (YouTube format). This measurement is in seconds needed for the process, thus lower = better.

As you can observe, hyper-threading kicks on for the Core i7 processors big time.

Multi-threaded Video Transcoding H.264 (DD5.1) to x.264 AC3 5.1

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. As such this is probably the best test in the entire review. We encode a h.264 Dolby Digital 1080P trailer of 150 MB to Matroska x.264 with 5.1 channels AC3. It's compressed in such a way you can play it back with Haali media splitter and/or FFDSHOW codecs. We use Handbrake software which is multi-core aware... the more processor cores it sees, the faster it can and will transcode. This software is also a perfect benchmark for CPU and memory testing.

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. It's exactly in applications like these where processors with more cores, really shine as they are all utilized to the maximum.