With VirtualDub we converted a full-length DVD movie to DivX format and saw how long it took for this conversion to be done. DivX codec is capable of recognizing and using not only more than one CPU (i.e. more than one core) but also the new SSE4 instruction set, so we expect that CPUs with SSE4 support reach a higher performance here.

The movie we chose to convert was Start Trek – The Motion Picture: Director’s Cut. We copied the movie to our hard disk drive with no compression, so the final original file on our HDD was 6.79 GB. After compressing it with DivX, the final file was only 767.40 MB, which is quite remarkable.

The results below are given in seconds, so the lower the better.

VirtualDub-MPEG2 + DivX 6.7	Score	Difference
Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (3 GHz)	1868.35
Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3 GHz)	2326.08	24.50%
Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66 GHz)	2480.07	32.74%
Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93 GHz)	2890.99	54.74%
Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66 GHz)	3102.93	66.08%
Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66 GHz)	3134.10	67.75%
Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 GHz)	3453.18	84.83%
Pentium 4 550 (3.4 GHz)	6216.51	232.73%