Here’s the pitch: Write a Python script that iterates through a sequence of compiler configurations, each with its own path and unique cflags, and compiles FFmpeg. For each resulting build, decode a long movie twice, tracking the execution time in milliseconds. Also, for good measure, follow Reimar’s advice<\/a> and validate that the builds are doing the right thing. To this end, transcode the first 10 seconds of the movie to a separate, unique file for later inspection. After each iteration, write the results to a CSV file for graphing.<\/p>\n And here’s the graph:<\/p>\n Look at that!<\/em> gcc 4.3.2 still isn’t a contender but gcc 4.4-svn is putting up a fight.<\/p>\n Here are the precise details of this run:<\/p>\n See Also:<\/strong><\/p>\n What’s in store for round 4? It sure would be nice to get icc 11.0 series working on my machine for once to see if it can do any better. And since I have the benchmark framework, it would be nice to stuff LLVM in there to see how it stacks up. I would also like to see how the various builds perform when decoding H.264\/AAC. The problem with that is the tremendous memory leak that slows execution to a crawl during a lengthy transcode. Of course I would be willing to entertain any suggestions you have for compiler options in the next round.<\/p>\n Better yet, perhaps you would like to try out the framework yourself. As is my custom, I like to publish my ad-hoc Python scripts here on my blog or else I might never be able to find them again.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To configure this, modify SOURCE_DIR and BUILD_DIR (the latter is very important since the script will ‘rm -rf’ it before the build, just like in FATE). Find the 2 places in the code that state “\/home\/fate\/movie.avi” and replace them with your favorite long media file. Then, monkey with the CONFIGURATIONS dictionary and the sub-dictionaries within (modifying the “cflags” and “compiler_path” keys). After the thing runs (BTW, you might want to redirect stdout to \/dev\/null), look for output.csv in the current working directory. Go ahead and modify the ‘make -j3’ part to an appropriate number of CPU threads for your machine. Oh, and run at your own risk, particularly due to the automatic ‘rm -rf’.<\/p>\n
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