XP 64 & Video processing/editing outlook?

FurryCurry · Post by **FurryCurry** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 1:45 pm

I poked around the doom9 forums the other day, looking for anything on this, but came up empty handed.

Has anyone tried to use any of the popular procesing tools, like avisynth, vdubmod, codecs etc under XP 64 bit, or have any idea if they work/break due to how deep into the system the go? Any info on porting/recompiling going on to take advantage of the expanded architecture?

I figure commercial editing apps will show up in 6-12 months max, if not sooner, but I'm more concerned with the cool freeware stuff.

No plans to upgrade for 6-12 months here unless forced to by hardware failure, but it would be nice to know whether it would be worth it to pop for a really nice machine & XP 64, just in case.

I figure digital video is one of those areas of desktop computing that could see a significant boost from 64 bit, even if it's just having access to more than 4 gigs of ram, so I'm a little surprised not to see more discussion/anticipation.

Any gems of info out there to share?

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 7:05 pm

VirtualDub (not Mod) works under XP64. As for AVISynth, it won't be happening for a while because of many changes in the way assembler is treated, as well as the fact that a lot of the time-critical portions of AVISynth are already about as fast as they'll get.

See this thread for more information:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s ... adid=87623

The assembly cores of the latest releases of XviD include AMD64-specific code. I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes (haven't tested it out yet), but, well, there you go. I think x264's on the way, too.

I'm not sure what the situation is for DivX, but to be honest, I don't really care

FurryCurry · Post by **FurryCurry** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 9:51 pm

Thanks, Trythil.

I guess I missed that thread, or was looking in the wrong place or something.

That thread pretty much tells me what I wanted to know.

bum · Post by **bum** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 6:59 pm

hey thy, would it be possible to compile a 64bit version of a high end linux editor such as cinerella? 64bit linux has bein out for a few months at least, so any 64bit advantages could probably be seen now.

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 7:47 pm

bum wrote:hey thy, would it be possible to compile a 64bit version of a high end linux editor such as cinerella?

Yeah, I'm running Cinelerra in 64-bit mode right now

I can't really compare it to Cinelerra in 32-bit mode because I've not run it in 32-bit mode on the same platform, but I do like its performance and stability.

bum · Post by **bum** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 6:45 am

What about encoding and rendering speeds? Outside of editing, how would coverting a vob to xvid compare in speed with 32/64bit processing ?

CerebralAssamite · Post by **CerebralAssamite** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 7:22 am

But wouldn't programs that run under the normal 32bit still work under 64 since at the moment the only O/S's available force the cpu to run at 32?
Well untill Loghorne comes out..

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 10:39 am

CerebralAssamite wrote:But wouldn't programs that run under the normal 32bit still work under 64 since at the moment the only O/S's available force the cpu to run at 32?
Well untill Loghorne comes out..

What about certain distros of Linux?

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 3:39 pm

bum wrote:What about encoding and rendering speeds? Outside of editing, how would coverting a vob to xvid compare in speed with 32/64bit processing ?

I don't know, I haven't made the comparisons yet

One thing that is really NOT in favor of 64-bit video processing (at least on the AMD64 platform) is that a lot of the 32-bit stuff has very tediously hand-optimized assembly for time-critical sections. Very little of that has been ported to x86-64 -- the only one I know of is XviD; Avery Lee may have rewritten VirtualDub for that too but I honestly haven't been keeping up with that. For now, a lot of the 64-bit video stuff is running not with tuned assembler but with compiler output of equivalent C code.

This isn't always a bad thing, but there's a reason why that assembler is there: it's there because the coder, a human being, can sometimes produce a sequence of instructions that will run faster than an equivalent sequence generated by most compilers. Thus, the AMD64 will take a performance hit simply because the code we're using just isn't yet tuned for its architecture, but I expect that to change soon.

XviD, however, may provide a fair comparison; I'll have to do that sometime.

CerebralAssamite wrote:But wouldn't programs that run under the normal 32bit still work under 64 since at the moment the only O/S's available force the cpu to run at 32?

Nope.

First: There is no guarantee that a processor designed to work with 64-bit words will run anything that expects 32-bit words.

Second: Consumer versions of Windows aren't the only OSes out there

Everyone else has been running on 64-bit architectures for a long, long time.