[ot] asf encoding acceleration
thomas r.
place to ask and hope for a good answer.
I rebuilt the amcap example to encode the audio and video from USB
cameras to asf/wmv. And I'd like to capture the data from 5 or 6
cameras at once with one computer. But asf encoding of one stream
already utilizes about 60% of my old developement PC's processor. And
I fear that 6 cams are even too much for the fastest processors on the
market.
So my question: is there any hardware that could help to accelerate
this task?
Best Regards,
Thomas
Alessandro Angeli
> Sorry this question is a bit off topic, but I don't know
> an other place to ask and hope for a good answer.
> I rebuilt the amcap example to encode the audio and video
> from USB cameras to asf/wmv. And I'd like to capture the
> data from 5 or 6 cameras at once with one computer. But
> asf encoding of one stream already utilizes about 60% of
ASF/WMV is a file format, not a video encoding format. Most
likely you are encoding to WMV and storing it into the ASF
file.
> my old developement PC's processor. And I fear that 6
> cams are even too much for the fastest processors on the
> market.
Not really: a quad-core or a dual-quad-core CPU most likely
would be able to keep up with 6 x VGA/D1 streams. The
encoder version and encoding settings can also make a huge
difference.
> So my question: is there any hardware that could help to
> accelerate this task?
Some video capture cards support hardware WMV9/VC-1 encoding
but I am not aware of any encoding-only card, except maybe
the latest nVidia or ATI cards, which might help encoding 1
stream. You should take a look at the VC-1 Encoder SDK,
which can take advantage of hardware acceleration (if
provided by the hardware vendor in a compatible DLL), and is
a little bit faster by itself (but you need custom code to
use it in a DirectShow graph that sinks to the WMASFWriter
filter).
--
// Alessandro Angeli
// MVP :: DirectShow / MediaFoundation
// mvpnews at riseoftheants dot com
// http://www.riseoftheants.com/mmx/faq.htm