Improving ffmpeg performance on older i5 windows machine

Question

I'm saddled with using ffmpeg for some video conversion on an older windows box. Unfortunately my app crawls to a halt whenever ffmpeg is running. Can any ffmpeg experts suggest any performance tips to optimize ffmpeg?

These are the arguments I am supplying ffmpeg with

['-i', _master, '-s', '720x540', '-sws_flags', 'lanczos', '-qscale:v', '1', '-y', _tempMaster]

Actually forgot 2 additional operations

2 CONCATENATE

['-i', "concat:" + _head + "|" + _tempMaster + "|" + _tail, '-c', 'copy', '-y', _concatALL] 

3 MUX WITH AUDIO AND HIGH QUALITY TRANSCODE

['-i', _audio, '-i', _concatALL, '-vcodec', 'libx264', '-crf', '22', '-vf', 'hqdn3d=1:1:1:1,unsharp=2:2:.7:2:2:0.0', '-y', _finalOutput] 

Answer 1

• Lanczos filtering is pretty expensive. Can you try a different image filter? fast_bilinear is pretty doggone fast compared to lanczos, but will reduce image quality slightly. Just replace lanczos with fast_bilinear and compare.

• A lot of what's slow about ffmpeg has to do with codecs, and it's not clear from your commandline options what muxers/demuxers/encoders/decoders/filters you're using, other than libswscale. Codec options have a lot to do with the computational complexity of a video job.

• Make sure you are running the latest version of ffmpeg.

• Try swapping out libav/ffmpeg to see if it helps. They've diverged a bit lately.

• Maybe compile a new version of ffmpeg from source, using a more advanced compiler with Link Time Optimization and other expensive optimizations, such as Visual Studio 2012's compiler, or Clang.

• If the operating system is 64-bit, you can get at least a 5 to 10% performance speedup by using a 64-bit build of ffmpeg. The additional CPU registers will definitely help with the tight loops of an encoder or image resizing algorithm. I think all processors branded "i5" to date are 64-bit enabled, so installing a 64-bit OS would be an option if you're running 32-bit.

• If you seriously need to shave off milliseconds and have a lot of time and knowledge of C, use a profiler to time a debug build of ffmpeg. See where (in what methods/filters/codecs) it spends most of its time. See if you can work out some micro-optimizations, or maybe cut corners in quality to speed it up.