hyperthread support

[go_jesse]

Hi, I know that I and a lot of other people now have single processor desktops that support hyperthreading HT which makes my machine look like it has two CPUs. Have you considered a feature to thread the encoder at all? Ideally it would thread keyframes or maybe 4k data hunks or something like that so that on the fly encoding would work but be faster. I'd even use a feature though that ripped to WAV on disk and then split the file in two and passed each half to a different thread.

Forgive me if this is impossible. :-) Let me know if its a silly idea. I think you could see at least a few percent improvement if not more.

thanks for the great ripper program, I'm going to register mine.

[Spoon]

Re: hyperthread support

Many of the encoders would not work like that, some might but would be very specific - it is up to the codec writers themselves to add this sort of optimizing.

[LtData]

Re: hyperthread support

Also, if the converting is being done while ripping a CD, the encoding would only marginally be improved, as the bottleneck would then be the HDD read/write speed and CD ripping speed.

[go_jesse]

Re: hyperthread support

thanks for the replies, here is an interesting image of a recode from wma to ogg going while ripping in another window.

(2 instances of MusicConverter.exe running.)

For reference, my drive rips at 22-35x and fastest I can encode is 10x with a single process. It would be cool if you could write a provider consumer model for MusicConverter so that it would just encode as fast as it can (with one or two or whatever threads) and the rips could continue unabated. (yes i have lots of drive space)

http://www.aracnet.com/~micro/images/multi.jpg

Anyway, whatever happens, appreciate your response.

[LtData]

Re: hyperthread support

When you use CDGrab to rip a CD, there actually are two threads running: CDGrab.exe and MusicConverter. You can manually assign one of the processes to your CPU2 via the Windows TaskManager I think. You could try this and report back as to how it works.

[go_jesse]

Re: hyperthread support

thanks! thats a good idea, but cdgrab doesn't use any cpu time.

I have started ripping to flac and doing batch encoding runs overnight. Batch encoding is an even better spot for multi thread. One song to each encoder thread.

anyway, appreciate the responses.

[LtData]

Re: hyperthread support

thanks! thats a good idea, but cdgrab doesn't use any cpu time.

So says task manager, but the CD doesn't magically go to the RAM, you know.
Just try assigning it to CPU2 and see if it helps. Also, remember some conversions take longer than others.

[go_jesse]

Re: hyperthread support

I'll note spoon implemented this in the reference power pack encoder :-) Yay, but I have yet to be able to test it.