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New system advice (crunching mpeg)

B

Bruck

Senior member
My main goal for this new system is to cut down the time it takes for backing up my movies and for processing video from my DVR...

(ignore if you want to) Not copying store movies, i have a big collection and my younger siblings tend to scratch every movie rated under pg-13, so my goal is to take my collection of 150 and make useable backups. Anyway (like that matters)..... (/ignore)

I'm not sure how much of a difference the components at today's hardware standards will have on the machine when ripping, compressing and burning movies. I am thinking of putting twin plextor burners or something that will perform the best in the machine, and attempting to process/burn more than one movie at a time. I would also like to run some games on here, but at the moment I don't game at all, so the dvd processing will be the most consuming of the machine.

Any suggestions would be great. Thanks!

 
You're probably going to want to go with a high-end Pentium 4. They're generally better with most encoding apps than Athlon64s (because of the higher 'real' clock speed, and better SSE2 performance, and SSE3 where it is supported). If you are making 1:1 backups (onto DL media), this is not a concern, as you will not have to do any re-encoding. You could even look at dual CPUs (Xeons or Opterons) if you want to really cut down your encoding times, or to work on multiple movies simultaneously.

To ease the bottleneck of your hard drives while re-encoding (if you are going DL->SL, or making DivX-based backups), you'll want to encode from one drive to another (and preferably have the drives you encode between be striped arrays of some sort, for higher STR).

Burning the actual disks should be easy; the CPU usage required for that is quite low.

Gaming just requires a fair amount of RAM and a fast video card (assuming you already have a decent CPU in there).

www.doom9.org has a LOT of information on these sorts of topics. You might take a look there if you want more detailed recommendations.
 
Thankyou,

For the time being I am going DL > SL. To sum up what you said....

I would run

2 dvd burners (SL for now)
2 striped hds.... maybe raptors in a raid setup? which raid would be best for this type of setup.

Run the same re-encoding program twice and re-encode each movie from drive 1 to drive 2? I currently use mac software to do all my re-encoding and it takes a while... I'm also curious how long its taking people with a pc to re-encode a DL disc to SL size. I'm assuming dvdshrink is the app of choice, and can it be used twice at the same time?

will the machine benefit from 1gig+ (ie: 2gig of ram).

When it comes to ripping the dvds to hd, is it true that plextor drives are slow??? (maybe a buddy of mine had a rare problem, but his drives won't extract info at more than 2x)


Thanks for any feedback.

p..s Thanks for the suggestion of doom9 but they have a 5 day waiting period to post to the board, so it looks like I have to wait till next week to ask the question, I've searched their archives and have not found anyone asking exactly my question..... but i appreciate it, till then I'll either hope to find other opinions on here and keep reading their archives.
 
i can do some tests when i get home for you if you want. i have a p4 3.0. ill see how long it takes to rip dl to sl for ya if you still that info later.

if you really want to do 2 at once, get a dual cpu system for sure.

JB
 
well right now it takes me 10 - 22 min to rip to hd. 35 - 50 min to re-encode (compress) and 25 to burn (2x dvd-r). I'd be interested what kind of times you get for each of these steps. I don't really HAVE to do 2 at a time, but if i'm not using all the systems resources.... and dvd-r drives cost 50 bucks, then why not? I'm curious how much time i can cut out of ripping.

For refrence, on the mac I use macTheRipper to rip/decrypt, DVd2oneX to compress, nero to burn (i know the speed of the drive is the only bottleneck in this situation).
 
well I can rip and encode both at the same time in 14-25 minutes total on Athlon64 3200+. Burning would be the same anywhere dependant only on the burner, and 25 minutes sounds about right.
 
Do not use Divx to make backups. Use Xvid. Also, Xvid is enhanced to take advantage of AMD cpus. Clockspeed doesnt not matter. What happeneds in each clock cycle does.
 
Xvid, I'm not familiar with this i was going to use Dvd Shrink/ Decrypter or a combo with dvd2oneX
 
There is only two types of raid for just 2 drives, striping and mirroring. You'll want striping with 32k stripe size.

Doing 2 movies at once will likely increase the overall time it takes and be great at fragmenting your drive.

For once aeternitas is right. Xvid is a open source implementation of divx. (think reverse engineering, then reverse spelling) It's really great. their site seems to be down at the moment. http://www.xvid.org/

What's your budget? Can you afford a dually?
 
Use TMPGenc as I know it is one of the best programs that takes advantage of HT...Turn on multithreaded and I saw gains of 19-22%.....

Also fact is my 3.5ghz p4 was faster at dvdshrink with deep analysis then my 2.6ghz is now....I tested it....Without HT the 2.6 is faster. Without deep analysis it is a slight win for the A64....Fact is dvdshrink 3.0beta (the urn I ran the test on) is HT aware in the deep analysis portion of the app...

I haven't done much Xvid encoding so I cant comment...

You wouldn't want to do 2 movies at once, but for an IO reason and not HT...HT will get the 2 done faster together then eacxh single as long as the app in the single mode is not HT optimized already....Then you will take a much bigger hit by losing the 15-20% you could have gained in that app by it being multithreaded....Leave the encoding to run by itslef as you get the next one ready, and burn the backups...HT is great for all of this...
 
I could afford dualies if it would make a big difference consensous seems to be do one movie at a time, I just want to fly thru this process, as I plan to be doing it VERY often.

Right now the way I do it on my mac (for comparison) is

rip a movie, sometime or immediately after I compress it (if need be) , then after that I burn it.....

In this situation I was thinking having 2 dvdr drives would be nice since i sometimes have a full HD with a bunch of images on it, and I want to take them off, so i'll just sit there and burn/delete 5 movies in a row. If i had 2 drives i could burn 2 movies every 10 min (or even less with a 16x burner?)

Also: my intention is to play these in a home player, I wouldnt want to use a codec like divx or xvid for my intended purpose My goal is to make backups to play in a regular player. Not sure if that was clear or if I misunderstood the Xvid suggestion.
Thanks.
 
NO that is fine and all can be done....Use SATA HDDs and free up the 2 ide channels for one for each burner....

Duals can speed up the encoding quite a bit. I still recommend one at a time for issue free stuff, bu tht turn over can be very nice....

I have tried many apps so if you need nay help on apps to use (I do same thing as you)...drop me a PM...Be glad to help if I can...
 
So if I were to build this monster machine so that It can tear through all 3 steps of the burn and rip process.....

If i process just one movie at a time, 2 processors will still make a difference?

If i were to config this, where is the bottleneck? the ripping speed of the drives? are some considerably faster than others?

Thanks
 
In apps that are multithreaded it can be huge with 2 physical cpus.....

Ripping speed is a bottleneck by the dvd-rom drives that cannot really be overcomed as long as most drives are ATA33/66...The harddrives can handle much more ...

Configuring drives is a helpful thing to give slight boost but is by no means a bottleneck when it comes to ripping....

My good old 3 year old Liteon 16x dvdrom is still one of the fastest DVD rippers...I can reach up to 14x rips on single layer disk and less then that with DL....DL will slow you down a bit. Also some drives like toshiba have had firmware where it llocks max ripping speed at 2x...man that will slow you down a ton!!!
 
Most people would be shocked to pay this much for a motherboard, but this is the most future-resistant motherboard I've ever seen. Dual socket 940, so possible Quad operation (with dual core), and Full 2x x16 PCIe, and two PCI-X busses. Given that moore's law is pretty much over due to thermal issues and the problems with 65nm ICs, this should be good for quite a while.
http://tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we.html
http://www.8anet.com/merchant.ihtml?pid=2417&lastcatid=5&step=4

PSU for it
wait for this
http://www.pcpowerandcooling.com/about/whatnew_850_ETX.htm
or get the '510w AG'
http://www.pcpowerandcooling.com/produc...formance/turbocools/index_hp_atx-2.htm


CPU - These have the best performance price ratio. Best deal according to pricewatch too.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=19-103-389&depa=0

Ram - The best. Opterons need Registered dimms
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-145-462&depa=0

HDD - The fastest SATA drive out there.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-144-160&depa=0

DVDRW - Best all around dvd burner.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=27-106-960&depa=0

Case - This is the cheapest black aluminum fulltower that will support the mobo
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=11-163-023&depa=0

with all major component minimums
$1469

Decent vid card. Not the best, but will certainly play more than a few games.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-127-147&depa=0

$1656

if you can afford more get another stick of ram first
if you can affore more after that get another raptor for raid 0
both those totals
$2007

That would rip through encoding. And the upgradability is astounding.
 
as for your (ignore part). It's not illegal to rip and burn dvd's for your own backup purposes and as long as you own a real copy. It is illegal however to sell or distribute those copy.

I'm not sure if that's what you meant by(ignore) or not but just to let you know.
 
To Ribbon13


Thankyou for the detailed example of a killer machine!!! I really appreciate the time it took you to do that. However, I forgot to mention (as i didnt know it would matter) that the case I build it in has to be no taller than 17.5 inches and I am leaning towards the antec sonata. The system sounds like a killer setup, but I'm not sure it would litteraly fit in my current desk, leaving me feeling pretty dumb for building a machine that tall.

How much of a difference do you think that machine would truly have in realworld over the components suggested by others in this thread. Obviously I have no problem is MOST of the components you selected, in fact I'll probably purhcase everything you mentioned, but i think ill have to go with a different mb/cpu/case. Can you put dual proc in a midtower? I didnt even consider that ill you mentioned the case in your description.
 
Originally posted by: gggplaya
as for your (ignore part). It's not illegal to rip and burn dvd's for your own backup purposes and as long as you own a real copy. It is illegal however to sell or distribute those copy.

I'm not sure if that's what you meant by(ignore) or not but just to let you know.
Click to expand...



I realize that, that is why I wrote that, as many boards, there are people that would rather flame someone for talking about a topic that (could be pirating) I figured i would explain my reasons for ripping to avoid any such waste of text and time. Others who don't really care why I am copying dvds, can just ignore that part and skip to the actual technical quesiton.
 
Originally posted by: Duvie

Ripping speed is a bottleneck by the dvd-rom drives that cannot really be overcomed as long as most drives are ATA33/66...The harddrives can handle much more ...

Configuring drives is a helpful thing to give slight boost but is by no means a bottleneck when it comes to ripping....
Click to expand...


What if I used an ultra-wide scsi drive (my current system that i built a long time ago is all scsi, including a plextor ultra-wide cdrom drive) I thought I could move away from scsi with invention of SATA, but maybe a scsi dvd-rom drive could speed up ripping?

p.s. i have a pioneer scsi dvd-rom drive but its actually know for being slow.... top read speed is 6x for dvds.
 
Unfortuneatly, the smallest case that would work is 19" tall. However non-towers would work, such as rackmounts. like this one
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=11-192-014&depa=1

--

This dually will work in regualr ATX format, but you'll lose SLi (no PCIe) and PCI-X. You'd be limited to AGP video cards.

510W XE
http://www.pcpowerandcooling.com/produc...formance/turbocools/index_hp_atx-3.htm

http://tyan.com/products/html/tigerk8w.html
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-151-125&depa=1


---

Don't waste your money on a SCSI DVD drive. The one I listed is great. And you SATAize it too.
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=22-998-001&depa=1

The ATA66 isn't a limited factor however.
16x dvd reading is 21600 KB/sec. This is the max you're gonna get because the disc is spinning at 10krpm at 16x.
http://www.liteonit.com/ODD/English/e_product/e_sohw1633s.asp
 
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