As we roll out the brand new version of MegaPEG.X Pro, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about the speed of the new product.

First of all, pretty much every part of the compression pipeline, which includes resizing, filtering, color space conversion and the encoder core, have been written to the Velocity Engine.

Clearly the product's speed benefits greatly from this approach, but there are other side benefits that may not be immediately obvious.

First of all, because of the sheer volume of data that Altivec (aka Velocity Engine) can push, the actual CPU usage of the product is not that high. A few days ago I was running a S-VCD encode in the background on my PowerBook. I have a little CPU meter that has a Dock badge with two graphs, one for disk I/O and the other for CPU I/O.

Both graphs were running so low that I thought I might have left the encoder on 'pause'. I used Command-Tab to quickly switch to MegaPEG.X (Pro, Batch) to see what was up. Sure enough, the encoder was running fine, clipping along at about 3:1, which is a respectable speed to be sure.

But the great news is that even though it was running full bore in the background, I could hardly notice any effect on the foreground applications. To my way of thinking, this is exactly how a multi-tasking interactive system should behave.

The other side benefit of using the Velocity Engine is that with each CPU revision and improvement in memory bus speeds, the relative increase in speed of the product is much greater than with scalar (ie. straight PowerPC G3) code.

In the future we will see Dual Core G5 CPUs with multiple Altivec (IBM calls it VMX) units in each core. I can tell you, if you like the speed of this encoder today, you won't believe what it is capable of then.

The other great benefit of the speed increase is, of course, the potential to make more iterations of the compression.

I liken mastering for DVD to mixing and mastering audio for making CDs: ideally, you will 'listen' to the product many hundreds of times before submitting to the pressing plant.