AutoMKV x264 Encoding

Website: Doom9

We tested x264 compression using AutoMKV version 0.90 and x264 to compress a 1.1GB DVD VOB file into 350MB MP4 file using a two-pass encode and we used a 112kbps LAME encoder to compress the audio. The whole process is dependent on both single and multi-core performance and the entire encoding time was recorded.

There's quite a shift to using MKV or MP4 wrappers for x264 content now, especially for movie content and those in the large anime fansubbing community. x264 doesn't have the same SSE enhancements as DivX 6.7 but the benefits of extra cache and better memory performance should still show notable improvements.




With that said though, the difference is very minimal, the Corsair at 800MHz 5-5-5-18 adds just over a minute to the encode time compared to the Crucial at 4-4-4-12, but the overclocked Crucial is only 8 seconds faster in a test that's nearly 40 minutes long. For the length of test, there's very little difference across the board and the increased chance of instabilities from overclocking the memory on its own just isn't worth it if you're heavily into your video encoding.

Paint.NET x64 3.20

Website: Paint.NET

This is the 64-bit version of the popular free image editing software, Paint.NET. It's not as advanced as something like Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, but it does serve well for most image editing tasks.

We used the PDNBench script to test the processing times for a range of images and filters. The multi-threaded software also takes advantage of multi-core processors quite effectively. For more information on what the benchmark script entails, please see this thread on the Paint.NET forums.


The Paint.NET test is far shorter, and the fractional differences reflect this – you'll not see any real world difference, in fact, there was a greater difference in the amount of time I took to click the test with the mouse between each run.