videos benchmarks on phoronix

[JohnAStebbins]

So I think that adding some video tests (with xvid, avc1, mpeg2, x264 movies) could interest lots of people.
What do you think about it ?

I'd like to second the request for x264 tests. It is a good stress test of an operating systems scheduler because of it's multithreaded nature. It spawns and joins many threads rapidly (currently it doesn't do thread pooling). A recent bug in the linux kernel was discovered and fixed through x264 tests.

See http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=185

[Michael]

I'd like to second the request for x264 tests. It is a good stress test of an operating systems scheduler because of it's multithreaded nature. It spawns and joins many threads rapidly (currently it doesn't do thread pooling). A recent bug in the linux kernel was discovered and fixed through x264 tests.

See http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=185

A basic x264 test profile can be found in the Phoronix Test Suite Git code for 2.4 Lenvik.

[Kano]

Hopefully something with really high bitrate - best over 40 mbps with L4.1.

[dashcloud]

A basic x264 test profile can be found in the Phoronix Test Suite Git code for 2.4 Lenvik.

Michael, looking at the git diff, I believe your description isn't correct: the VideoLAN project just hosts the git repo & mailing list for x264- it's not their project.

Michael, please tell me you did not disable the asm code when compiling x264. Not enabling the ASM in x264 is like ripping the heart out of the program. The assembly is what makes it such a fine program- it's finely tuned to get the absolute most out of processors.
The assembly covers x86 (32 bit, 64 bit, and Windows 64 bit); PPC and later ARM versions are also supported in the program.

I don't know enough about the options other than to give you the following advice:
Examine the presets and see if any of them are suitable- these are what everyone who uses FFmpeg+libx264 to encode will use, and unless they have a very good reason, will use with x264. And ask the authors (especially Dark Shikari) if you want the program to do something in particular- they're quite approachable. They are very happy to work with people to create works that show off what the program can do.

[Michael]

Michael, please tell me you did not disable the asm code when compiling x264. Not enabling the ASM in x264 is like ripping the heart out of the program. The assembly is what makes it such a fine program- it's finely tuned to get the absolute most out of processors.
The assembly covers x86 (32 bit, 64 bit, and Windows 64 bit); PPC and later ARM versions are also supported in the program.

It was just a temporary limitation until yasm was supported by PTS External Dependencies, which it does now support tonight.

[dashcloud]

Thanks so much Michael!

[jmsjms]

Great move to "open" the test suite protocol !

I see 2 parts for the video test :

1/ performance part : how hard the cpu works to decode some samples in different usual formats at different usual resolutions (576p, 720p, 1080p).
For this part I could imagine some ways to script it.

2/ capabilities part : how good does the graphic card do its job.
Does it provide hardware decoding acceleration by playing some video formats ? is rendering tearing free ? does noise reduction do its job ? does 3:2 pulldown detection do work ? etc etc
For this part it's a lot more difficult to imagine how to script it

(Michael : yes I'am tho one who wrote to you yesterday. today I would like to check that I 'm not the only one in *nix world interested by (and using it for) video playback )

do you know which exist test(/suites) can test the framerate of video playback?or an extra test suit to download it.

[gbeauche]

In speaking of brute performance GPU load would be an interesting item, but to my knowledge we can't get it.

You can programmatically get it on ATI HW through the AMD Display Library (ADL). However, I am not sure this includes the UVD block. Still, this can give a rough idea.

[Michael]

You can programmatically get it on ATI HW through the AMD Display Library (ADL).

There's also ways to get it without using the ADL. The Phoronix Test Suite already supports monitoring ATI GPU load without using the ADL but it's also exposed via OverDrive, etc.