[MEncoder-users] Fwd: Questions on Mencoder performace

[RC]

On Mon, 05 Jun 2006 18:19:35 -0400
larrystotler at netscape.net wrote:

>  I used the following command to re-encode:
> 
>   mencoder file -alang en -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts 
> pass=1(pass=2:bitrate=1536) -o file

No "turbo" ?  That should really speed-up the first pass, without
noticable quality drop.

>   How much does L2 cache impact performance? Is 512k L2 a huge benefit
> over 256k?  Would a real P4 be better than the Celeron Mobile?
>   How much does memory speed impact performance? Would switching the 
> CeleronM to DDR make a small or huge difference?

All this will be a benefit, but not a significant one. 
Number-crunching CPU speed matters the most.

>   How much does Hard Drive speed affect performance? 

Practically not at all, unless you're encoding from huge raw/lossless
files.

>  Are there further command line arguements that I need?

There are a lot that could help speed things up.  "turbo" would be a
good one to start with. 

>   I prefer XviD since it seems to work better on slow cpus(my kids
>   have 
> 300-400Mhz laptops, and Xvid doesn't drop frames that bad but X264 did
 
Xvid is the "proper" name of an MPEG-4 codec.  So is lavc (FMP4), Divx,
etc.  They should all have approximately the same properties, and any of
them can playback videos created with another.

H.264, on the other hand, is a completely different codec than regular
MPEG-4.  Newer, higher quality, and much more CPU-intensive.