After suddenly getting interested in time-lapse video, I added the time-lapse video recording feature in MediaCoder with a USB camera or any other DirectShow video capture device. Here please see a demo I just made.
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Using MediaCoder for time-lapse video recording (Stanley posted on May 9th, 2012 )
Verision numbering changed (Stanley posted on May 3rd, 2012 )
I finally decided not using year number as MediaCoder’s version number any more, as this will force me to change the it every year, which I feel is a pressure on me. I switched back to the traditional and continuous version numbering scheme of AA.BB.CC.BUILD. Current major version number of MediaCoder is 0.8.12 which is equilivant to former 2011-R12.
I am planning for and working on some new features, including better image overlaying feature, better paralell tasks handling and improving distributive transcoding. Next major version will be MediaCoder 0.9.
Running away from HostMonster (Stanley posted on April 13th, 2012 )
I just purchased a VPS on Linode and spent a whole afternoon to migrate the MediaCoder blog, forum, wizards and the offical website from HostMonster which surprised me so much by suspending my hosting space with the execuse of malware infection of some web pages. Read the rest of this entry >>
MediaCoder iPhone Edition Benchmarks (Intel MSDK vs x264) (Stanley posted on April 7th, 2012 )
Today I performed a benchmark test with lastest MediaCoder iPhone Edition (which has improved support for Intel MSDK), by transcoding the same 720p H.264 MKV file to a MP4 file of iPhone 4 profile, respectively with encoder of x264 (fast preset) and Intel MSDK (balanced preset). The two times of transcoding result in video with near visual quality. The difference in transcoding speed and CPU utilization is somehow significant. With x264 encoder, the CPU utilization is near 100% and the overall speed is about 3.4x (versus playback speed). With Intel MSDK encoder, the CPU utilization is near 50% and the overall speed is about 7.9x, which is 132% faster than using x264.
TAGS:benchmark, H.264, Intel MSDK, x264
Test H.264 High 10 Profile encoding with MediaCoder (Stanley posted on March 30th, 2012 )
MediaCoder has supported H.264 High 10 Profile (10-bit color depth) encoding since quite a long time ago. However, due to the lack of good and free decoder and player for this profile, I haven’t seriously test with it until today. I encoded a 720p video clip in Hi10P at 1Mbps (really low for HD content) and played the encoded content with VLC 2.0.1. The result is quite impressive.
MediaCoder configured for Hi10P encoding
TAGS:H.264 Hi10P
Tips for using Intel MSDK encoder in MediaCoder (Stanley posted on March 10th, 2012 )
Recently I’ve been spending some time improving MediaCoder’s support for Intel MSDK encoder, the GPU acclerated H.264 and MPEG-2 encoder from the chip giant. A new revision of MediaCoder (before I can finish and implement all the major improvements in my mind and release MediaCoder 2012), is released containing several improvements including slight performance boost when using Intel MSDK encoder to perform hardware accelerated encoding.
Actually the performance of Intel MSDK encoder is astonishing. This comes from the good implementation of the underlying multimedia facilities of Intel Media SDK framework, as well as the multi-threaded design of MediaCoder, espeically its built-in large circulla frame buffer used for efficiently transferring raw audio and video data from decoder to encoder.
Here I give some tips for using Intel MSDK encoder in MediaCoder.
TAGS:accelerate, GPU, Intel, MSDK
MediaCoder runs almost flawlessly on Windows 8 (Stanley posted on March 4th, 2012 )
Today I installed Windows 8 in VirtualBox and the first application I got running on the preview version is MediaCoder. The result is MediaCoder can run almost flawlessly on Windows 8. When Windows upgraded from Windows XP to Vista, MediaCoder got some problem with the new UAC. But this time, the shift is smooth for Win32 applications like MediaCoder.
Some thoughts about MediaCoder 2012 (Stanley posted on February 20th, 2012 )
MediaCoder 2011 R10 build 5226 was released last week. It has several minor fixups and updates of encoders and tools. I don’t know if this will be (or not) the last revision of version 2011 as I am preparing for the major update and release of MediaCoder 2012 which will feature:
- XML-layouted images/texts/dynamic data overlay on video (last year I’ve developed a rendering engine for another project and I am going to integrate it into MediaCoder)
- more detailed report on complete of tasks
- fixing the annoying blocking issue on parallel task processing from the root
- better distributed transcoding support
- a new splash screen that I change every year
Because right now I am involed in so much other work (e.g. I am absorbed in Arduino and is about to develop a simulator for it) in addition to MediaCoder development which I have enjoyed and continued for more than 5 years, I just want to make sure the new version 2012 will be out before too many days of year 2012 are passed away. 
If you like MediaCoder, please stay tuned with me here on Google+ or on the MediaCoder blog.
What Intel Media SDK brings to MediaCoder (Stanley posted on February 20th, 2012 )
MediaCoder started to adopt Intel Media SDK in early 2010. By using the GPU accelerated encoder provided by the SDK, MediaCoder achieved significant increase in H.264 and MPEG-2 encoding speed, which reaches up to 5 times faster than encoding with x264 or FFmpeg. Being able to off load the heavy encoding computations to GPU, MediaCoder can better use the CPU to perform I/O operations, task management，audio decoding/encoding, stream multiplexing and most importantly video decoding which is also computational complex and obviously there are too many long-existing or legacy formats to have the GPU implementation for all of them. Comparing to nVidia’s CUDA accelerated H.264 encoder, Intel’s implementation provides much better visual quality, which makes the GPU accelerated video encoding acceptable by industrial customers, especially those of MediaCoder KTV Edition who perform massive transcoding for serious business use.