Better VCD captures with MSPro6

[Dr Mordrid]

For those with fast SIMD capable processors (PIII, CeleronII, Athlon & Duron) only!!!

If you've captured MPEG-1 with MSPro6's default VCD presets and thought the quality was low try this;

1. load c:\....\Ulead MediaStudio Pro 6.0\Ulead.dat\CapMPTyp.ini into Notepad

2. NTSC: search for the [MPEG_TYPE_SETTING_10] heading and change bAllowModify=0 to bAllowModify=1

3. PAL: search for the [MPEG_TYPE_SETTING_11] heading and change bAllowModify=0 to bAllowModify=1

This will allow you to modify the Performance and Advanced setting for VCD captures.

Performance is actually the MPEG quality setting. The default is 3 but it can be adjusted form 1 to 15. Setting this higher gives better quality captures if the processor can keep up. Just don't forget that higher MPEG quality settings can't compensate for a lousy source.

If you just want to change the default setting then look for the me_performance=3 entry and change it to a value between 1 and 15.

Don't mess with the bitrate or audio settings. The same goes for the Advanced settings unless you know MPEG better than the average bear.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 12 July 2000).]

[wkulecz]

Is this the "patch" to force MS Pro6 to detect P-III class machines? On another formum I'd seen someone claim Ulead's P-III (SIMD?) detection was "broken".

I made a 320x240 MPEG1 with MS Pro6.0VE Video Capture's VfW MPEG capture on a dual P-II 450 box running windows 2000 and the results of the default setup were surprisingly good compared to what I was geting on my P-III 500 box. Could be my expectations were lowered, or a particularly "lucky" source material, or the dual processors let the MPEG encoder have enough time to work well with the defaults.

Other's have claimed Ulead doesn't "take advantage" of SMP. Not really clear what is going on here. I'll try your tip as soon as I can (which unfortunately won't be soon) and see if it improves the single processor P-III MPEG performance.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

I'm using a PIII/600 if that helps.

Dr. Mordrid

[IM_Riktar]

According to Uleads Tech support MSPro 6 does NOT take advantage of SMP processors.

[Dr Mordrid]

MSPro6 does not use SMP.

SMP = Shared memory Multi-Processor = multiple CPU's

MSPro6 DOES use SIMD.

SIMD = Single Instruction stream, Multiple Data stream = MMX2

SIMD functions are what speeds MSPro6's MPEG encoding and as far as I can tell they do work.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 12 July 2000).]

[wkulecz]

It's too bad Ulead doesn't support SMP. But the idea behind SMP is even applications not specifically multi-threaded will benefit indirectly if the OS uses seperate threads for system functions like disk I/O and display updates.

Last go around I had a P200-MMX with NT4/win98 dual boot and a dual P166 running NT4. The SMP performance of NT and Pentium was just not very good, and almost never was noticably better than the single P200.

Now I have a PIII-500 win2000/98se dual boot
and a dual PII-450 with win2000. The dual box seems to run much better. My only conclusion at this point is that W2K has much improved SMP support compared to NT4 on applications not specifically written for SMP.

I've hed to put my video editing aside, but in the meantime I've got a deal going where I'll end upgraded from dual P-II's to dual PIII-500's I'll try MPEG encoding of the same source on each box and see if there is any "improvement" in quality or encoding time. (transcode vs MPEG capture). It'll be an interesting test.

As an aside, multi-threading a CPU bound task for SMP performance may result in reduced performance on a single CPU, so Ulead might have a valid reason for not supporitng SMP in the current version.

My SMP box is really for everything *but* video editing. I only installed MSPro6.0ve to do a quick MPEG encoding since my video editing setup is still in boxes from the new wife moving in.

--wally.

[A_BIT]

Atholon has a their own version of SIMD, but it isn't SSE (ala PIII). Is MSP 6 written to take advantage of AMD's instruction set or Intel's???

This is the quote I found --

Intel® Pentium® III instruction support improves overall performance

on this page --
http://www.ulead.com/msp/new.htm


[This message has been edited by A_BIT (edited 13 October 2000).]

[Michel Carleer]

Hey, I thought SMP was for Symmetrical Multi Processor???? For what it means.
Michka


[This message has been edited by Michel Carleer (edited 13 October 2000).]

[wkulecz]

Yes SMP generally means Symmetrical Multi-Processing in a computer context meaning that nothing special needs to be done to get some benefits from more than a single CPU. Multi-threaded programs benefit directly. Single threaded code benefits indirectly as the OS can run application code on one CPU and system code on another.

I've also heard it refered to as Doc said, Shared memory Multi-Processor. This is a more hardware centric, OS independent description. There are shared memory multiprocessor systems that are not "symmetric" meaing the code is specifically taylored for the number of processors and amount of shared memory.
To my knowledge no "general purpose" computers are built this way.

SIMD is Single Instruction Multiple Data which is basically a vector processing scheme where the same instruction sequence is applied in parallel to different data with special hardware. A big win in processing both channels of stereo audio or runing other "multimedia" data streams.

I don't know if ULEAD supports AMD's version of SIMD.

--wally.

[Michel Carleer]

Thanks Wally.
Michka