Video Encoding performance

Video encoding takes lots of processing power. Strictly speaking, the more powerful the host PC is, the faster the rendering process will become.

Our review PC is fitted with a ‘Dual Core’ Athlon processor and a large 2 Gigabyte of RAM.

TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress is one of the few applications which will currently take advantage of a dual core processor. Below we have a screenshot of CPU usage during the process of rendering a MPEG 2 data stream.

As we can see from the above screenshot, both CPU cores are being utilised by TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress.

Testing method:

For our tests we used a short video clip, 2 minutes 39 seconds in length. We then encoded the file in a number of commonly used formats such as MPEG 2, MEG 1, DivX, WMV and QuickTime. To compare the quality of the encoded file, we first viewed our source video clip on our test PC and then compared the quality with each of our rendered files.

Test video clip

MPEG 2 encoding:

For our MPEG 2 test we used our test video clip and chose a constant bitrate and set the encoding mode to the (prioritize quality) setting.

We chose DVD standard MPEG file to maintain compatibility with standard set top DVD players.

In the above screenshot we can see our chosen bitrate setting, in this case 8000Kb/s.

We then started our encoding. The time taken to encode our video clip can be seen the above screenshot. In this instance TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress took 1 minute and 50 seconds to encode our video clip.

We then viewed our encoded file, the quality was extremely good.

VCD encoding:

For our VCD test we once again used our video clip and chose the VCD standard setting for PAL output.

VCD video standard file

Once again the file was encoded, this time taking only 1 minute and 30 seconds to complete. The file was then viewed and the quality was good.

MPEG 4 encoding:

MPEG 4 standard stream type

For our MPEG 4 test we chose the standard for H.236 encoding.

Again the encoding didn’t take to long and was completed in 1 minute and 21 seconds. The encoded file was then viewed and the quality was good.

HDV encoding:

HDV standard for 1080i

In the above screenshot we can see we have selected the 1080i standard for encoding our files. This format is used on some camcorders.

This time our test video clip has taken longer to encode. This is not surprising as TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress had much more work to do. It still managed to complete the task in a very commendable 12 minutes and 52 seconds. The encoded file was then viewed, the result was superb.

SVCD encoding:

PAL SVCD standard using CBR (constant bitrate)

The standard settings were used to encode our test video clip.

This time our test completed in 2 minutes and 45 seconds, we then tested our encoded file for quality. Once again the quality was good.

WMV encoding:

WMV (Windows Media Video) format

We selected the standard settings for our test.

TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress took 9 minutes and 58 seconds to encode our test video clip. We then viewed the encoded file and the quality was very good.

DivX encoding:

DivX file format

We chose the applications default output quality setting

Our test completed in 3 minutes and the quality was good.

QuickTime encoding:

QuickTime output format

We selected the default format and quality setting.

Our test video clip was encoded in a fast 2 minutes and 32 seconds. We then viewed the encoded file and the quality was very good.

Summary:

The performance of TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress is excellent and the quality of output is also very good.

Let’s head on to the next page where we take a look at TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress editing features....

Program run through

Editing and filter features