This might be a dumb question but: Quality & CPU Load?

[judoGTI]

I use FFDSHOW with Sage which in turn really bogs my CPU load which occasionally will cause a dropped frame/stutter. My question is, does change the quality level (currently set on BEST) to something like GREAT or DVD Long Play will this help to reduce my CPU load?

I know the harddrive size of the recordings will be smaller, but I question of that will really help the CPU out at all when it comes to play back? Can some of the techinal guys chime in and tell me if this would be a good bottleneck to help free my CPU up or if other things are the actual bottleneck and changing this wont help?

Thanks!!!

[Wakecrash]

I'm not an expert on this, but what about record both ways while viewing cpu utilization in task manager.

[nielm]

Originally Posted by judoGTI

I use FFDSHOW with Sage which in turn really bogs my CPU load which occasionally will cause a dropped frame/stutter. My question is, does change the quality level (currently set on BEST) to something like GREAT or DVD Long Play will this help to reduce my CPU load?

it is unlikely -- the quality settings affect the encoding of the MPEG2 file, while decoding will still use about the same amount of CPU time... The only thing that would make a difference would be using quality settings such as VCD and SVCD that use smaller resolutions (so fewer pixels to decode!)

Decoding DVD-quality MPEG2 does not use much CPU on modern systems a 500Mhx PIII should be able to do it with no problems) ... The thing that is using major qualtities of CPU is complex deinterlacing and scaling settings in FFDSHOW, and using renderers such as VMR9 which, depending on your vid card, may do some calculations on the CPU instead of your CPU.

All I can suggest is to play -- change one setting at a time (eg Overlay renderer instead of VMR9) and see if it makes a difference to the CPU load during playback...