MPEG2 =HARWARE ENCODER , TWIN ATHLON MP'S or CINEMA CRAFT??

[RimmeR]

Hi,
I've been playing around with lots of settings in TMPEG, So to get get the best final output Mpeg2 file for DVD-R. The best i've come up with is a slightly modified template of this pwp.netcabo.pt/0165394101/TMPGEnc_Template.html .
The thing is, that, to encode a 3 hour Avi in this sort of template will take me 72 hours constant. I tried encoding 10 mins 47 secs. and it took 4.01.39 hours so in my calculations its 72 hours in total.

As this is rather ridiculous i'm thinking of changing the way i'm going about this.

1.) Twin Athlon Mp Processors. cost £400 approx
2.) Hardware Mpeg2 encoder. cost £650 approx
3.) Cinema Craft. cost ...????
4.) Overclocking pc??

Current System

Win XP Pro
1.4 Athlon 266 FSB
Coolermaster HHC 001 Delta Heatpipe www.coolermaster.co.uk/hhc-001.htm
Asus A7V266 Mainboard
512 DDR Memory
Asus 8300 G-Force 3 Deluxe
Pioneer DVDR-AO3
40 Gig IBM "Ericson" IDE 7200
60 Gig IBM "Ericson" IDE 7200
Customised Case inc. 6 Fans, LCD, Temperature controlled
www.totallycustomised.com
FireWire
100 Mb Network Card

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

[RimmeR]

hmm, money starting to get warm in my pocket
Any ideas yet ?

[zoraz]

I've only been burning xvcd's since the summer so I don't have a voluminous experience base, but I would go the twin-AMD route. I use tmpgenc 2.02, and I got a dual-1400 not long ago and it makes a sizable difference. It's enabled me to reasonably experiment more with higher bitrates and quality tweaks with the time savings.

'Course, it also helps that I have a couple of hard drives in portable firewire carriages from ADS that I use to shuttle files between the computer I use to capture/trim converted vhs-to-avi footage and the dual-proc that I tmpgenc/burn xvcds.

never used cinema craft, not drawn to hardware encoders
my two cents

[RimmeR]

Thx for the reply,

Q.) Do you know the difference in timescale between using a single processor, compared to duel?