Windows 7 - Your Actual Video Encoding Speeds

For those who like video editing, we all know we need to compress these edited files to a smaller, compressed format while retaining as much video quality to the original. I would like to compare video encoding speeds with different users. Here's actual data that I gathered for my machine.



I mostly captured the video by using Fraps when playing Left 4 Dead. I pretty much compared two different OS's, the xvid and h264 codecs, resolutions, framerates, and CPU temperatures; I wanted to see how these parameters affect the video encoding speed.

My Analysis
For Windows XP x86, h264 is not worth 3x as long for the quality, so you're better off with xvid or mpeg4.

For Windows 7 RC x64, if you don't care about speed, go for xvid. Otherwise choose h264 since it encodes faster (but with higher CPU temps). But if you have a nice cooling system, then temperature may not be an issue.

It can be hard to distinguish between video encoding quality (i.e. how the output video looks, if there are a lot of pixelizations, etc.), but I think h264 has slightly better quality than xvid.

It seems h264 scales better than xvid as you go higher in resolution (in terms of video encoding speed). For instance, if a video is 640x480p30/60, then the xvid codec will be slightly faster than h264. But if a video is 1280x720p30/60 (or 1920x1080p30), then the h264 codec will be faster than xvid.

It's interesting to see that h264 performs better in Windows 7 than in WinXP. But then maybe it was because of the shift from 32-bit to 64-bit? But then how come xvid performs worse in Windows 7 than in WinXP? Does h264 favor a 64-Bit OS while xvid favors a 32-bit OS?

My framerate while recording a computer game is better in Windows 7 than in WinXP. Again, it could be because of the shift from 32-bit to 64-bit.

Other Notes
My min. idle core temp. is 37C, but average is low 40's.
Recording Framerate = the framerate that's set in Fraps.
Actual Framerate = the gameplay framerate while recording in Fraps.
Encoding Time(factor) = If a video is 30 seconds long, and it takes 1 minute to encode it, the factor is 2; It took 2x as long to encode the video.