[Libav-user] Maximize CPU usage when decoding h264

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Winter Fa <winterfa at ...> writes:

> My question is what factors are affecting the CPU usage of decoding h264 
> videos?

(Many, among them cabac vs cavlc, B-frames, bitrate and probably less 
obvious things. There is a x264 option that takes this into account iirc 
but it may not suit your use case.)

> Is there a way to maximize CPU usage so that decoding can become faster?

Intra-only streams allow to use much more CPU while decoding.

Is your use-case to decode as many files as possible in a given time 
or to decode one file as fast as possible? If you have many files, 
-threads 1 is significantly more effective (up to the bandwidth of 
your hard disk).

Carl Eugen