Any benefit to using a flash drive to scan from?

[sheppy99]

Is there any speed benefit to using Comskip with H264 to scan from a Flash Drive? It's currently taking 45 minutes to scan a 30 minute show on a core i7!

[erik]

No benefit, CPU speed is the limiting factor.

[sheppy99]

Thanks for the reply, can you offer any speed up tips? Any way to force it to max one of the cores or to use more than one core?

[erik]

It should max out one core. But as it gets switched between cores you may see the load evenly spread over all the cores.
if you have a quad core and one comskip.exe is running you should see 25% load evenly spread over all cores.
Would it be beneficial to have a comskip version that uses all cores to the max?

[sheppy99]

I think a version that uses all cores would be a very good idea, it should speed things up a lot especially if it could be run at a lower than normal priority. I think DVRMSToolbox launches it this way
Please let me know if I can help with testing the standard here is h264 with aac-he or dolby digital sound in 1080i, 720p and 576i with a spot of mpeg2 sd thrown in for good measure.

[erik]

I just remember something.
On Vista and Windows 7 comskip gets started in a "disk loading friendly" way, that means it not only run's on a low priority but also the disk IO is limited to ensure it does not interfere with normal operation.
COuld you check to see if the CPU load indeed maxes out one CPU core otherwise the disk IO limiting is hampering the speed too much

[sheppy99]

I think all 4 stick at 25percent total use as in 1 core maxed out, will check later and report back

[sheppy99]

Just checked, Comskip.exe is taking 25% CPU on this 4 virtual core i5 CPU. Looking at the CPU usage graph one virtual core is close to 100% when Comskip is running, the other 3 are slightly up on idle.

[erik]

That is correct. So the CPU is the limiting factor. And enabling multi core decoding (when implemented) will speed up with a factor 4

[sheppy99]

Superb - any idea when you will have anything to test? I've found Comskip to be really good at finding ad's without much configuring.
As an aside would you like some samples of New Zealand HDTV in WTV format to test with?

[erik]

No need for .wtv as I can not demux .wtv yet

[sheppy99]

No probs, let me know if you do work out a demux for it and I can let you have some samples, NZ is a slightly odd variation.
Cheers