Why-oh-why can't quicktime use multiple-cores?

baos

Could anyone shine a light on this question for me?



If i remember correctly i saw quicktime do a render with all 8 cores going full bore at an apple seminar once. Why do i have to wait for an hour for a render being processed by 1 core at a time (the active core switches every 3 seconds)



Maybe it's render settings dependant?





image added to illustrate the annoyance. (imagine "estimated time remaining: About two hours" underneath the progress bar)

endymion

It depends on what is being processed and the codec used. Often it's a linear process where only 1 thing can be calculated at a time before moving on to the next piece which would only allow one processor to be used since it can't calculate anything else at the same time.

marvin

Quote:

Originally Posted by baos


Could anyone shine a light on this question for me?



If i remember correctly i saw quicktime do a render with all 8 cores going full bore at an apple seminar once. Why do i have to wait for an hour for a render being processed by 1 core at a time (the active core switches every 3 seconds)



Maybe it's render settings dependant?

Yeah it depends on the compressor but most things done in Quicktime take ages. Quicktime X in 10.6 will hopefully be reworked to solve this problem. It may even have hardware accelerated encoding.



For nearly all my encoding needs, I use VisualHub. It always uses my processors to full capacity, supports batch encoding and uses faster encoders. Plus it exports mpeg-1 and wmv, which is handy if you ever target powerpoint presentations.

rezwits

This is why we are going to love 10.6...



Compressor can segment certain types of compression jobs equal to the number of cores you have.



Laters...