Are demuxing / multiplexing affected by multi-tasking?

[blue2]

I'd just like to know if when PgcDemux or Muxman are used whether doing anything else at the same time (e.g. surfing, writing emails, etc.) has any detrimental effect on the result, as it can for example when one burns? Do these apps have a buffer and just "adjust" their speed according to how much CPU is available? Thank you.

[borax]

No problem. Just slower.

[blue2]

That's good news. So it will have no affect at all on the quality. Thank you for that quick reply. It would just be difficult to verify whether there is any detrimental effect without going through the entire process and then examining all the elements, whereas burn results are pretty apparent. Thank you again.

[lordsmurf]

It's mostly related to the hard drive. So don't do too much hard drive work. Something that takes a little RAM and CPU, with minimal HDD access (e-mail, web browsing, etc) is fine.

[blue2]

Hello, and thank you for the reply. My question is as much theoretical as practical as I really don't know much about how demuxing/remuxing works.

So, to be sure I understand, too much hard drive activity could have an effect on output quality in deumuxing/remuxing? For example, could taxing the CPU affect audio and video differently and therefore create de-synchronization that wasn't there before or degrade audio/video quality?

Would there be any way to determine how much is "too much" before getting to the final burn stage? For example, with ImgBurn I could see how the buffer is being affected and so I imagine one could determine when too much CPU is being diverted elsewhere.

Thank you again.

[AlanHK]

So, to be sure I understand, too much hard drive activity could have an effect on output quality in deumuxing/remuxing? For example, could taxing the CPU affect audio and video differently and therefore create de-synchronization that wasn't there before or degrade audio/video quality?

There will be ZERO difference in quality.

When burning a DVD, the process requires it to be a smooth operation. It has to keep going above a minimn and below a maximum speed.

Calculating and writing to hard disk, which is what muxing and such is, are writing to RAM and hard disk. It can stop or start at arbitrary times, write one byte or a gig. The process should not notice at all.

Of course, some badly written applications may cause problems if there isn't enough memory to go around. In that case they generally crash and/or freeze. Generally, they work perfectly, or not at all.

[redwudz]

I don't see that it would have much, if any, effect on quality, just the speed of the operation. If you had only one small hard drive and you were running more than one hard drive intensive task, you might drop frames, but your hard drive light would be flickering more or less continuously, so that should warn you that there might be a problem.

Having 2 (Or more) hard drives would be one way to help out the situation. I use a boot drive, a edit drive and a archive drive and try to edit between the last two. You may run into problems or slowdowns with just one drive even without multitasking if the OS is accessing the drive at the same time as you want to use it for editing.

[AlanHK]

If you had only one small hard drive and you were running more than one hard drive intensive task, you might drop frames, but your hard drive light would be flickering more or less continuously, so that should warn you that there might be a problem.

Frames can be dropped when the app is displaying in real time. For operations like muxing, this is not the case. That will slow down, or stop. It won't skip frames.

[blue2]

Fantastic. Those explanation are the clearest I've seen anywhere (and I've looked) on if this would be an issue (whether theoretical or practical) or not. Many thanks.