Speed - Brute Force, Hardware, GPU?

[saintmac]

I have a Mac OS X box with a Core 2 Quad overclocked to 3.1 GHz. I want more speed. I think these are my options, and was wondering what is the best (cheapest and fastest) approach. I currently use Handbrake, but would also consider other software options. Ultimately I am concerned with the end result, not the tools I use, per se. I am generally doing 1080 > 720p conversion.

Brute Force
Upgrade to Intel i5 2500k and simply have more processing power.

Matrox Compress HD
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/6 ... _MCHD.html
PCI hardware encoding board. Appears to accelerate encoding on older and/or dual core machines, but doesn't seem to help on Quad core, meaning the base hardware is faster than the card at that point. Quality appears less than Handbrake. Would require QuickTime instead of Handbrake.

Elgato Turbo.264 HD
http://www.amazon.com/Elgato-Turbo-264- ... B0021AEPTY
Similar concept to Matrox board, but USB and much cheaper. Quality appears worse, as does speed.

GPU
Many modern GPUs support x264 decoding and encoding in hardware. Even the i5 2500k onboard video (Intel HD Graphics 3000) supports it. Are there other good/cheap encoding solutions that support GPU acceleration? Will Handbrake ever support GPU acceleration (and under what OS)? Would this even help versus just adding CPU?

Thanks for any thoughts.

[Deleted User 11865]

I have a Mac OS X box with a Core 2 Quad overclocked to 3.1 GHz. I want more speed. I think these are my options, and was wondering what is the best (cheapest and fastest) approach. I currently use Handbrake, but would also consider other software options. Ultimately I am concerned with the end result, not the tools I use, per se. I am generally doing 1080 > 720p conversion.

Brute Force
Upgrade to Intel i5 2500k and simply have more processing power.

Or even i7-3930K if you can afford it
The processor itself is only a bit more expensive than the Matrox card.

Matrox Compress HD
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/6 ... _MCHD.html
PCI hardware encoding board. Appears to accelerate encoding on older and/or dual core machines, but doesn't seem to help on Quad core, meaning the base hardware is faster than the card at that point. Quality appears less than Handbrake. Would require QuickTime instead of Handbrake.

This would have the advantage of hardly using the CPU, freeing it for other tasks. But as you pointed out, quality probably doesn't match that of x264, especially at slower settings. And QuickTime doesn't support as many input codecs as HandBrake or other libavcodec-based solutions. QuickTime's downscaling is probably a little worse than HandBrake's (lanczos via libswscale), too.

Elgato Turbo.264 HD
http://www.amazon.com/Elgato-Turbo-264- ... B0021AEPTY
Similar concept to Matrox board, but USB and much cheaper. Quality appears worse, as does speed.

Same as above. Also, it reportedly still uses some amount of CPU power, IIRC.

GPU
Many modern GPUs support x264 decoding and encoding in hardware. Even the i5 2500k onboard video (Intel HD Graphics 3000) supports it. Are there other good/cheap encoding solutions that support GPU acceleration? Will Handbrake ever support GPU acceleration (and under what OS)? Would this even help versus just adding CPU?

No. They support H.264, not x264. x264 is a very good software H.264 encoder, not a codec.

Quality of GPGPU H.264 encoding (CUDA, Stream, OpenCL) is pretty poor (only comparable with some of x264's fastest settings). Intel's Quick Sync video is more promising, as it uses dedicated hardware for encoding (like the products from Elgato and Matrox above), but AFAIK there is no way to use it under OS X at the moment.

x264 developers have expressed interest in adding support for Intel's QSV hardware, but this will probably never happen. Intel made it unnecessarily cumbersome (not documented, Intel wants you to use the hardware via their own proprietary SDK - which includes an H.264 encoder, but it's not the same as porting x264 to use the hardware directly). As it stands, the latter would require reverse-engineering of some kind.

[saintmac]

Sounds like Brute Force it is! Darn, it's ridiculous we don't have better GPU or hardware support.

[mac_man_ad]

The thing with hardware encoding on GPUs is that, once past the marketing, it isn't actually that brilliant with current algorithms. The current ideas for most stages of video encoding just don't scale well enough to be worth running on the many cores of a GPU, or require mathematical operations that GPUs just are not optimised to do. One day, when someone comes up with new algorithms it will be an amazing speed boost and no quality loss. Until then, it is mostly just marketing.

And it is all moot until the competitors come up with a standard API across all operating systems, and models. Otherwise x264 or libav, or whoever, must make choices as to which OS and which graphics cards their software can be run with, and no developer likes saying "you must be using graphics card x". It limits the market for their work.

[Tree Dude]

$500 for such a limited piece of hardware is not worth it. If you can get a i7-3930K (would need a new motherboard as well) I think you would be very pleased with the speed