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Handbrake does four cores?

Cave Man

Cave Man

macrumors 604
Original poster
Feb 12, 2007
7,160
350
Neander Valley, Germany; just outside Duesseldorf
I'm in the process of getting a hackintosh built on the Core 2 Quad (what a stupid name) Q6600. I've been using a 1.66 gHz Core Duo Mini for the bulk of my DVD conversion work. The Mini has about a 1:1 transcode ratio - a 1 hour video takes about 1 hour to transcode with Handbrake.

However, tonight I discovered that my $1,000 hackintosh will do 1 hour of video in 12 minutes, and Activity Monitor shows quite clearly that Handbrake uses all 4 cores (around 315%). Dyna or anyone else care to verify or comment?
 
Cave Man said:
I'm in the process of getting a hackintosh built on the Core 2 Quad (what a stupid name) Q6600. I've been using a 1.66 gHz Core Duo Mini for the bulk of my DVD conversion work. The Mini has about a 1:1 transcode ratio - a 1 hour video takes about 1 hour to transcode with Handbrake.

However, tonight I discovered that my $1,000 hackintosh will do 1 hour of video in 12 minutes, and Activity Monitor shows quite clearly that Handbrake uses all 4 cores (around 315%). Dyna or anyone else care to verify or comment?
Click to expand...

My MacPro Octo does 2 hours of .m4v video in about 30 minutes...
 
Handbrake will use all eight cores of an octo Mac Pro. It generally utilizes about 80% of each core.
 
cohibadad said:
Handbrake will use all eight cores of an octo Mac Pro. It generally utilizes about 80% of each core.
Click to expand...

Yeah Handbrake is amazing on an 8 core Mac - it really just flies through anything. You can knock over a 2 hour DVD into iPod format in about half an hour.

Awesome combination.
 
Yah, all 4 of my cores maxes out when running HB.

It irritates me to no end that only a few programmers like those at HB seem to understand the benefits of fully using the hardware that's there.

Go HB!
 
Easy way to find out is load up Activity Monitor and find the process and see how much processing power it is using. Since you have 4 cores, it'll be up near 380% CPU.
 
Beware however that various parts of HB are different. x264 is by far the most optimized encoder HB uses (and for serious mac encoding fortunately the only one that really matters). Kudos has to be given to the x264 team for it is truly optimized as well as can be expected. The deinterlacers however are less optimized so if using deinterlacing ymmv. As well, the muxer will typically use only one core. So the muxing phase which is fairly short may appear to "hang" somewhat but menu meters should reflect that only one core will be used during muxing.

However, since the meat of encoding is "typically" done with x264, HB typically will max out your processors as well as anything.

Note: we are testing a patch provided by van which simplifies the fifo pools an should make HB even more efficient. So here's to hoping all of our fans hold up ;)
 
HB is so good beyond it's speed with muliple cores. VFR is beautiful. The .ts ability is awesome. I have a couple of difficult DVDs (BMW Films and Pixar Animated Shorts) that completely confuse HB so I mpegclipped them to ts streams and they loaded right up in HB for encoding without any loss of resolution. Although the audio options for getting 5.1/DPLII in latest HB builds confuse me (of course I could just read the forum and figure out how to use it but I've been too lasy).
 
How are you people getting 30 minute encodes for 2 hour DVDs? Are you using H.264 or MPEG-4? I have a Quad-Core Mac Pro and I get an average of 25fps using H.264.
 
My hacintosh with a 2.4 gHz Core 2 Quad (Q6600) does a 2 hour movie in about 25 minutes using the Apple TV preset (2500 bitrate H.264, AAC and AC3 passthrough). I'm going to work on overclocking it to 3 gHz, which many suggest will do just fine and very little increase in heat. Not bad for a $1,000 computer.
 
Cave Man said:
I'm going to work on overclocking it to 3 gHz, which many suggest will do just fine and very little increase in heat.
Click to expand...
Good luck Cave, my c2d mbp practically melts the fans down while running HB. Hopefully they will last. ;)
 
I've been encoding all day (dual pass H.264 3000 kbps + De-interlace + 5.1 audio) and while Handbrake is one of the best pieces of software I've used, it's also got one of the most difficult jobs.

It'd be great if there was a way of spreading the processing power across multiple Macs. The family iMac is sitting downstairs waiting for something to happen, and my MBP and the iMac are connected via gigabit ethernet. Might as well use it for something...
 
Nice. Without FanControl my cpu temps will get in the 85 c range which of course is starting to thermal throttle. With FanControl I can keep it *just* below 80 c and the fans spool up quicker. HB makes liquid cooling look like a good idea. Between the mbp and the atv I really don't even need the furnace in my house, just use the ambient heat from those two.
 
Careful here:

Killyp said:
I've been encoding all day (dual pass H.264 3000 kbps + De-interlace + 5.1 audio) and while Handbrake is one of the best pieces of software I've used, it's also got one of the most difficult jobs.
Click to expand...

Make sure that you are only de-interlacing things that need it, ie originated on video and not film.

According to eddyg (one of the handbrake developers)

"...deinterlace is not multi-threaded AFAIK - turn it on and you have a bottleneck."

De-interlace really slows down the process and using Fast de-interlace kills the picture quality.

Just a heads up
 
Cave Man said:
Is Handbrake xgrid-aware?
Click to expand...

No, and it probably would take a fair amount of work to make it Xgrid friendly. If you wanted to do it yourself, you could probably write up a script job using the CLI to do it though. You will wind up copying whole DVDs across the network doing this, so it will be pretty slow to startup. You might want a small supercluster to make it worth it. ;)
 
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