Low cpu utilisation when encoding.

[Scarlet Infidel]

I have just been doing some encoding using a range of codecs in a couple of apps and its going very slowly, i only seem to get up to about 60% cpu utilisation, Does anyone have any ideas why this is? Is this a software problem (ill move to another part of the forum) or a hardware thing?

[Dougal]

Could be memory related, if you can't store enough data in your RAM the CPU can't be used 100%

[Scarlet Infidel]

Thats what i thought but it shows as:
600mb of 1gb free
running at 1:1 with the cpu at 254mhz
latencies 2.5 3 3 7

So my ram is fast and available. Im using different hard drives for input and output too maybe i should check my virtual ram limits etc.

[TheAnimus]

you on a P4 or something that has hyperthreading?

if the app your using only supports ripping with one cpu, that might explain it.

other than that, check the thread priority, make sure its set to normal or higher.

[Scarlet Infidel]

I am using a p4, and i meant to say that i have HT off at all times (kills my max overclock). I have set the priority to all settings and it makes no difference.

[TheAnimus]

hmm most strange, HDD memory, bottle neck, doubht its chipset (assuming its board in ur sig).

It could be your overclock thou. Certain parts of the CPU can be shutdown, or take to long to function, and the management system can detect that. Try running something like prime95 and see what happens.

[Scarlet Infidel]

prime95 happily uses 100%.

[Scarlet Infidel]

Hmm, I tried another file and it seemed fine. I think its just this input video file.

Its a raw avi which i have never really dealt with before, would this affect it?

I would have thought not having to decode would speed things up. Maybe the huge data rate isnt so easy to process. Ideas?

[herulach]

Youre probably bandwidth limited, raw avi is a hell of a huge amount of data.

[arthurleung]

Raw DVD Quality AVI (720x480 30FPS 24Bit) requires 29.66MB/s of Bandwidth. If you happens to :
1. Write to the same disk as the source (Random Write slowing down the Seq read.)
2. Have the source in the drive which holds the OS (Same reason as above)
3. Have the source in a heavily fragmented partition (Random Read is never fast)
4. Use a fairly slow harddrive (I mean those <80G older gen harddrives)
5. Encode at a rate of >60FPS (60MB/s is the max read speed for MOST newest harddrives)

Something you can do is add a few enhancement filters, just to make the movie looks better (while keeping the CPU at load).

I never use Raw AVI, at most I use some loseless codecs just to save space and bandwidth.

[Scarlet Infidel]

I have never used raw avi before either, it was a foolish move. Im just letting it encode in its own time now. Id spend longer trying to improve it then it would take to finish anyway.