H264 Video Encoding slowdown on certain hardware configurations

[jstanton]

I'm using Intel IPP5.1.1, with the H264 codec from the media samples. In my development instance, I'm using 2.8GHz Pentium D's with 1 gig of RAM. With this, I'm able to encode/decode in real time and everything works fine. However, when at another site, we installed the solution on 2.2Ghz Pentium 4's with 1 gig of RAM, and the encoding seemed to slow down when there was a lot of motion on the screen. Once the motion stopped, then the encoding caught up. I'm fairly certain that it was the encoding, because this is a video conference sort of app, so what's encoded on one machine is decoded on the other, and when I used a 2.8GHz Pentium D on one end and the 2.2 Ghz Pentum 4 on the other, the image would only get slowed in one direction (the encoding on the Pentium 4).

Has anyone else noticed this sort of behavior? If so, are there minimum specs required for Real time H.264 encoding? I should mention that the image is 320x240 and we're doing 15 fps. Thoughts on this behavior? ideas? Thanks in advance.

Jamie

[Vladimir_Dudnik]

Hi Jamie,

Intel Pentium D is dual core system, so potentially it is almost twice faster in comparison with previous generations, like Pentium 4. I'm saying potentially because you need to implement threading in your application to take advantage from the modern microarchitecture features. The H.264 encoder from IPP media sample is threaded and so it takes the full advantage from two available processor cores, so it is faster.

Do you use IPP static libraries or dynamic ones? What processor specific library dispatched on your systems? (I believe it should be w7 for Pentium 4 and t7 for Pentium D). In normal cirumstances it should not be px, which is generic not optimized library.

Regards,
Vladimir