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| cheetos316 |
| Posted: Mar 22 2009, 04:02 AM |
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Newbie
Group: Members
Posts: 6
Member No.: 25298
Joined: 22-March 09
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With all this buzz lately about how AMD's and Nvidia's video cards all have hardware decoders for H.264, would it be better to encode my videos with H.264 so that I can use the video card to do the processing to free up the CPU?
I do a lot of TV recording on MPEG-1 (best option on my cheap TV card) and it takes up a lot of space so I've been encoding to DivX and then cropping out commercials to save space. Should I go for H.264 instead to free up the CPU? If so, would it save more space without losing too much quality?
What is the best H.264 codec to use with VirtualDub? I am really confused with all of the stuff I've seen (DirectShow, FFmpeg, bad to encode H.264 in avi carrier, etc.)
Thanks for your input!  |
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| i4004 |
| Posted: Mar 22 2009, 05:56 AM |
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Advanced Member
Group: Members
Posts: 2432
Member No.: 4935
Joined: 24-June 03
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well if you do sd and sub-sd(equal and less than 7xx x 576) then chances are you don't really need h264 accleration at all, as even older machines can decode it in real time.
in the future, yeah everything will have h264 hardware acceleration mostly because h264 hd content...
| QUOTE | | If so, would it save more space without losing too much quality? |
yes...
with recent x264 builds you can usually reach 3x decrease in bitrate over mpeg1/2 while preserving most of the quality...
ie x264 on 500kbit willl usually look just as good as mpeg1/2 on 1500...with a clean source...noisier the source, less of a difference...but x264 is still better...
here's the vdub version
http://sourceforge.net/projects/x264vfw/
get the version that's first on the list, not the x64, not the beta...
some of the things that can be don ewith it are really breathtaking...for example
http://www.mediafire.com/file/wnfm1eavwod/...m_stream_2e.avi
(800x600@400kbit/s)
from its crappy beginnings, x264 really became quite an impressive codec once AQ(different parts of the frame can be compressed with different strength) was added...
(prior to that it was usually too blurry....makes you scary to even think about how did mpeg1/2 looked before it got AQ...ie at what bitrates it started to look good...)
if you have multiple core cpu, be sure to enter 2(or other number of cores) of your system in the last tab of the x264vfw settings...
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