Measuring decoding performance

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

Why not just have a look at existing benchmarks?

I think this depends on what kind of decoders you want to benmark. For DirectShow-based decoders (ffdshow, CoreAVC, etc), there is Haali's tool. For anything you use inside an Avisynth script (e.g. FFMS2), 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.

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%

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.

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

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.

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.....