In the build 4560, you can easily set processor affinity for audio/video decoder and encoder. By clicking the check boxes which represent each core of your processor. If you have a quad-core processor, you will se 4 check boxes enabled and selected by default. Unticking a checkbox will cause a core not to be used by chosen decoder or encoder.  If you processor has many cores, this will be useful, as you can allocate different cores for different use, or preserve some cores free for your other tasks. Some tips:

• Even if all cores are selected, they are not necessarily be 100% utilized during transocidng. This depends on the multi-threading support in decoder or encoder.
• A started job will not be affected by the change of the affinity option, unlike the change of the prioirty option.

MediaCoder is improving all the time even if the version number keep the same. This time there are some major changes, so let’s increase the number after nearly 10 months. I’ve spent lots of time to prepare the release of 0.7. Let me briefly recall what has been changed. Read the rest of this entry »

Item grouping feature is added since build 4260. By selecting multiple items in the list and choosing Group from menu (right click an item to pop up), the items will be marked as the same group ID. During processing, they will be joined into one file. The grouping feature also prepares for the upcoming support for multi-track transcoding. The join mode is removed since then.

Item grouping in MediaCoder

Windows Media encoding is proved in the latest build 4224. Previously, when MediaCoder encoding Windows Media with Microsoft Windows Media Format component, audio and video data are encoded and muxed in one thread (despite the possibility that the component may have its multi-threading approach underlying). Now audio and video are encoded in separated threads, and the encoded streams are multiplexed after encoding process. This will eliminate some WMV encoding problem and bring in better encoding performance on dual-core processors as well as better container flexibility. If you experience problems with the new mechansim, please report.

A new task mode, benchmark mode, has been added since build 4210. In this mode, MediaCoder can be used to benchmark your hardware with media transcoding based on the your transcoding settings. During the process, the media content will be transcoded as in normal mode. The difference is there is no file created on hard drive and a benchmark result will be shown on the end of the procedure.

The steps to perform transcoding benchmark are as simple as following:

1. Add files used for benchmarking
2. Set up transcoding parameters
3. Set task mode to “Benchmark”
4. Click Start button to start benchmarking

Read the rest of this entry »

Wine is an open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix/Linux. MediaCoder, as a native Windows application, was able to run under Wine in many cases. Before a native Linux version of the software is developed, the Wine compatibility is improved in build 4180. Now MediaCoder can run more flawlessly on Linux platform. It is no longer necessary to install a Windows version of Firefox under Wine as MediaCoder will look for native Linux Firefox in the Linux system and invoke it to display the XUL-based user interfaces when needed.

The test environment is Gentoo Linux / Xorg / XFCE4 / Wine 1.1. There are known issues under Darwine / Mac OS which might be fixed later. If you still encounter problems under Wine, please report.

Dirac video encoding has been fixed in 0.6.1.4140. In the past, Dirac encoding was done by calling Dirac encoder DLL. Now it is done by FFmpeg, which allows the encoded bitstream to be muxed into a container format together with audio stream. Dirac decoding and playback is also supported by building Schrodinger into MPlayer and MEncoder.

Read the rest of this entry »

The x264 profile option changes to the encoder settings to let the encoded bit stream comforted to specified H.264 profile (baseline, main, high).

MediaCoder (build 3999) can now encode with the Enhanced 3GPP AAC+ encoder again. The encoder is updated (with the latest 3GPP AAC+ encoder reference code) and patched with some minor optimizations and AAC/ADTS container support by me. The Enhanced 3GPP AAC+ encoder is able to produce low-bitrate (16kbps to 48kbps) AAC+ with Parametric Stereo optionally.

The 0.6.0.3999 update contains the encoder. The x64 update contains the 64-bit version of the encoder which has an approximate 30% speedup than the 32-bit version.

In 0.6.0.3980, frames being encoded can be viewed. The frame is rendered with SDL at a specified interval so it won’t slow down the encoding speed noticeably and can be switched on/off instantly.

Please note that in some combinations (when video source is “default”, in this case, frames are not passing through MediaCoder), this feature won’t work.

In this build, several serious bugs have been fixed. For details please check the changelog.