[FFmpeg-user] ffmpeg cpu utilization

[Moritz Barsnick]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 09:46:09 +0530, sravanthy at bel.co.in wrote:
> Below is the command i am using to record video using ffmpeg on linux 6.0,
> but ffmpeg is utilizing 95% CPU, how do i reduce the cpu utilization.

Roughly speaking, video encoding is a triangle of parameters:
- bitrate a.k.a. file size
- quality
- encoding speed a.k.a. CPU usage

If you want to improve on one of those, you need to reduce one of the
two others. In other words, to use less CPU, you need to encode to a
lower quality or a lower bitrate (yes, they can be synonymous).

I don't know much about libvpx or VP8, but my suggestions is to reduce the quality
setting.
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/VP8

You could also consider grabbing at a lower frame rate or resizing the
video, if that's acceptable for you. (That's not one of the parameters
I meant above though, but has a big impact of course.)

Let us know how it went,
Moritz