Measuring decoding performance

[senze]

Hello,
I want to measure the decoding performance of my computer. I don't want to be the videos played in real time and I want to compare different codecs. If I decode every videos in real time this would take years. Any suggestion how I can do that?
Regards,
senze

[Guest]

Why not just have a look at existing benchmarks?

[LoRd_MuldeR]

I think this depends on what kind of decoders you want to benmark.

For DirectShow-based decoders (ffdshow, CoreAVC, etc), there is Haali's TimeCodec (http://haali.su/mkv/timeCodec.exe) tool. For anything you use inside an Avisynth script (e.g. FFMS2), AVSMeter (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=165528) would be the way to go.

In case you are using MPlayer (or want to benchmark any of the decoders supported in MPlayer), there is a "-benchmark" commandline option.

[senze]

Thank you.

Can you tell me what exactly the parameters of mplayer are?

BENCHMARKs: VC: 0.000s VO: 0.002s A: 0.000s Sys: 1.384s = 1.386s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 0.0000% VO: 0.1443% A: 0.0000% Sys: 99.8557% = 100.0000%

[senze]

Does someone could tell me which how much weight different the hardware parts have in decoding performance? For me seems the whole hardware part on decoding performance a bit like a black box.

[sneaker_ger]

For software decoding it's 99% CPU, for hardware it's the decoding chip. RAM, hard-disk etc. are negligible.

[Bloax]

I wouldn't call the harddrive negligible if it can't read enough for the video to decode really fast due to the sheer size of it. (Like, say - lossless 720p@50fps footage. My harddrive exploded.)

Unless we're talking about loading the entire video into memory just for the benchmark, of course.

[senze]

So if there are performance difficulties e.g. on an old computer then it probably is caused by the old cpu not the size of the RAM. I'm asking myself which properties a video must have to get problematic also for low RAM...... is it a very high bitrate and very big gob sizes?

What concerns the parameters of mplayer benchmark... A is audio? VC is video coding? VO is videooutput? and SYS is other stuff like harddrive? I really couldn't find anything in the documentation.....