Why my Core i7 cannot exceed 50% when transcoding?

[tokyotech]

I have a Intel Core i7 920 @ stock 2.66 GHz. I'm transcoding a 720p video to another 720p h264 video and streaming it over a www.veetle.com with:

Code: Select all

#transcode{vb=900,venc=x264{subme=7,ref=6,bframes=1},vcodec=h264,acodec=mp4a,ab=64,threads=4}:duplicate{dst=display,dst=standard{access=http,mux=asf,dst=localhost:1234}}

The audio is smooth but the video comes out at a low framerate. I'd say it's around 2 FPS. If I lower the resolution, then all is well, but I'd really like to learn how to transcode at high resolutions. I noticed that my CPU never exceeds 50% utilization when transcoding. How do I make it do more work so my stream is smoother? I've tried increasing the threads parameter to 8 because the Core i7's all have hyper-threading, but I don't notice any improvements.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Can you post the messages?