Hi,
I'm guessing this would be the right place for this question, but I'm just getting my feet wet with VP9, trying to see what I can get out of it and such.
Right now I'm using ffmpeg / libvpx and I'm trying to understand why my CPU usage appears to be so low. Assuming this is not an erroneous assumption based on what I'm seeing via Windows CPU usage graph and some different settings I've tried.
Basically on both my i5 and my FX8320 I never see the CPU meter ramp up to 99% etc. On my i5 (quad core) it hits about 50% with around equal usage on all 4 cores, sometimes one or two might spike up a little higher. Virtually the same on my FX8320 (8 cores, yes I know 4 of them are "virtual"). Although on my FX8320 its more like 25% and I'll see see high-end activity spikes on 3 out of the 8 CPU graphs.
I've tried raising -thread and lowering it and nothing really changes there, I get a consistent FPS of about 10 - 12 on my second pass encoding run on both machines.
The only major divergence I have seen is that for whatever reason, when I do a fast first pass (speed 4) on the i5 it hums along and levels out around 125fps or so. On my FX8320 though it chugs along much much slower, at around half speed or less. I'm not sure why that would be either.
So this is what I see on the FX8320 while running the current encode that is going at around 10 - 12 FPS
The file used for input is a UTCodec lossless AVI, with a resolution of 864x486. Target bitrate is 750Kbps. There is no audio track.
The command lines I am using are pretty much verbatim this page
http://wiki.webmproject.org/ffmpeg/vp9-encoding-guide
using the VOD listing.
I'm really trying to go for very good quality, while still keeping a fast encode speed, and the aim is I'm trying to find something that produces smaller files than x264 can at the same quality level I'm aiming for.
HEVC/x265 is nice (on the limited Anime tests I did) and encodes a lot faster, but has virtually no real web-browser / streaming support and that's really what I'm looking for here. It's more of a "low bandwidth access to my library" kind of thing I guess.
Right now its kind of an academic / curiosity thing. So if anyone can offer advice on tweaks to flags and such I can try, it would help me out a lot. I'm not very good at parsing documentation as half the descriptions just read like tech jargon to me and I don't really understand their relationship to performance/quality etc.