Sharing my MPEG2 encoding speed gains after my PC upgrade...

[q1aqza]

Thought I would share with you all some before and after benchmarks for DV to MPEG2 encoding times following a recent upgrade for my PC.

Before I go on I would like to make it clear that I am not bragging or trying to impress anyone with these times as my PC is not in the league of many of your PCs out there but I thought it would be useful to share with you all my own personal performance gains with not a vast cost outlay.

Previously I had an ECS K7S5A mobo and 1.4 Athlon T-Bird chip with 512MB of 2100 DDR RAM (266). My upgrade was just a new mobo, MSI K7N2-L (Nforce2 chipset) and an XP2400 CPU. Memory is still the same, so I believe there is room for additional improvement if I upgraded to 333 or 400 DDR RAM.

This upgrade cost me £225 and was my first ever DIY upgrade of this kind (I''ve usually bought new pre-built systems for a lot more money when I have wanted higher spec !!), so this is much cheaper for me.

My main objective was to speed up this process and I am pleased with what this upgrade has achieved. You'll notice CCE and TMPG had the most improvement in performance compared to Adobe MPEG Encoder (MainConcept), they increased to around twice the speed, and more.

Here are the results:

All tests used the same 1 minute DV file
Standard Settings for all tests
Audio Bitrate 224Kbps, Video Bitrates Max 8000, Average 6000, Minimum 3825, with no filters.

Adobe MPEG Encoder (MainConcept)
Test 1: AME Test 1.mpg
Adobe Mpeg Encoder Quality setting 21
default settings of
Noise Sensitivity = 12
Motions Search = 5

Encoding Time (mins) = 01:45
New Encoding Time (mins) = 01:03
__________________________________________________ ______
Adobe MPEG Encoder (MainConcept)
Test 2: AME Test 2.mpg
Adobe Mpeg Encoder Quality setting 35
default settings of
Noise Sensitivity = 5
Motions Search = 8

Encoding Time (mins) = 02:23
New Encoding Time (mins) = 01:28
__________________________________________________ ______
Adobe MPEG Encoder (MainConcept)
Test 3: AME Test 3.mpg
Adobe Mpeg Encoder Quality setting 50
default settings of
Noise Sensitivity = 5
Motions Search = 11

Encoding Time (mins) = 02:50
New Encoding Time (mins) = 01:47
__________________________________________________ _____
Adobe MPEG Encoder (MainConcept)
Test 4: AME Test 4.mpg
Adobe Mpeg Encoder Quality setting 50
NON default settings of
Noise Sensitivity = 0
Motions Search = 15
(this is the slowest setting available in this encoder - I think!)

Encoding Time (mins) = 13:02
New Encoding Time (mins) = 09:01
__________________________________________________ _____

CCE 2.66 Video Only (2-pass VBR)

Test 5: CCE Test 1.mpv

Encoding Time (mins) = 03:11
New Encoding Time (mins) = 01:30

__________________________________________________ ________

TMPGenc Plus 2.59 (2-pass VBR)

Test 6: TMPG Test 1.mpg
Motion Search Precision: Using Motion Estimate Search

Encoding Time (mins) = 08:02
New Encoding Time (mins) = 03:26
__________________________________________________ ________

TMPGenc Plus 2.59 (2-pass VBR)

Test 7: TMPG Test 2.mpg
Motion Search Precision: High Quality (Slow)

Encoding Time (mins) = 09:15
New Encoding Time (mins) = 05:18
__________________________________________________ ________

TMPGenc Plus 2.59 (CQ65 max 8000 min 3825 no Average)

Test 8: TMPG Test 3.mpg
Motion Search Precision: High Quality (Slow)

Encoding Time (mins) = 04:39
New Encoding Time (mins) = 02:42
__________________________________________________ _______

[mreed80]

Thanks for the info. The TMPGE numbers differences are quite impressive!

[q1aqza]

Thanks for the info. The TMPGE numbers differences are quite impressive!

Yes, it makes TMPG a much more viable solution now. I'm a little disappointed that the Adobe Encoder didn't improve to the same degree as the others because it is my prefered choice for DV encoding these days. Howver it has still significantly speeded it up so I can't complain