[MEncoder-users] Performance question

[Robert Paulson]

I have a 12GB HD transport stream mpeg that I am encoding to mpeg4.  I was
using v1.0rc1 off of the download site and thought that the encoding was
taking longer than my previous version of mencoder so I did a test.   Here
is the command I ran for both tests, which only encoded 1 minute of video:

mencoder  -quiet -aid 0x34 -vid 0x31 -ss 00:05:30 -endpos 00:06:30
/tmp/0328.atsc -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=ac3:abitrate=192 -vf
pullup,softskip,harddup,scale=720:480 -ovc lavc -lavcopts
vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=8000:aspect=16/9 -o /ts/0328.avi

With version:

MEncoder 1.0rc1-4.1.1 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
CPU: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 146 (Family: 15, Model: 5, Stepping: 10)
CPUflags: Type: 15 MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 3DNow 3DNowEx SSE SSE2

time reported:
real    11m48.062s
user    11m31.771s
sys     0m2.308s

with version:

MEncoder 1.0pre7try2-3.2.3 (C) 2000-2005 MPlayer Team
CPU: Advanced Micro Devices Opteron Sledgehammer (Family: 8, Stepping: 10)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags: Type: 8 MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 3DNow 3DNowEx SSE SSE2

time reported:
real    10m31.155s
user    10m25.503s
sys     0m2.764s


To me it appears that the prerelease of 1.0 is faster than 1.0 itself.  With
the later version taking an extra 75 seconds to encode a minute of video
that could build up to a significant amount of time when encoding a full
length movie.

I see that the later version detects my cpu differently, but I did not know
if that would make a difference, or if there were some significant
modification to how mencoder encodes video between these two releases.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Also I had to rebuild my machine so I think these versions were compiled
with different gcc compilers, but I would assume that the more recent
versions would be at least as efficient as it's predecessors.