Does my video card matter When transcoding from dvd to divx or xvid

[lookinup]

Hello Everyone I run a PD 950 on a supermicro motherboard with two 3ware 9550sx raid cards each with a 2T raid 5 array. I get sustained 350-380 mbps reads from both arrays. My dvd to be transcoded is on one array and the resulting xvid goes to the other array. I also have 8 megs of ram. Am I being limited by my onboard ATI graphics or is the conversion done completely with the CPU. My motherboard is a server motherboard and does not have an agp or pcie slot just 4 pci-x slots and a pci-e x8 slot so my graphics choices are limited. Any insite or suggestions. Also what is the preffered program for dvd to xvid as far as speed goes. There seems to be a ton of divx to dvd software but only a few dvd to divx/xvid choices. Thanks for any help or info.

[yoda313]

that conversion is strictly cpu related. Playback can be enhanced with a better graphics card but usually not by much. RAM can help a lot if you have an older computer or a slow processer. Just be prepared for it to take at least 2 or 3 times the length of the movie to do the conversion depending on your processor. Results may vary.

[lookinup]

Thanks, that helps a lot. The computer I use for conversion is my server because it has the dual core 950 and 8 megs of ram so I'm glad to know I don't have to try and find a good video card with a standard pci slot. I use two nvidia 8800 gtx cards in SLI for my gaming/workstation computer but it only has a dual core 840 and 2 megs of ram. My media center pc runs a single Nvidia 8800 gts. I only use the server for my movie collection and to do conversions.

[yoda313]

I'm sorry but don't you mean Gigs of ram????? 8megabytes of ram isn't enough for windows 95 to run let alone xp and other stuff...

correct if me I'm wrong just curious

[lookinup]

yes I did mistype megs for gigs. I doubt my server would run with only 8 megs of ram. it's got 4 2 gig sticks.

[edDV]

I'd put both the 950 and 840 machines to work. DVD MPeg2 or Dixv should play fine over the network from either machine.

[GrayStrickland]

that conversion is strictly cpu related. Playback can be enhanced with a better graphics card but usually not by much. RAM can help a lot if you have an older computer or a slow processer. Just be prepared for it to take at least 2 or 3 times the length of the movie to do the conversion depending on your processor. Results may vary.

I wonder...

AdsTech recently released an $80.00 video conversion accelerator which fits a usb port (and looks like a thumb drive). It converts *from* many formats, but only *to* H.264, whereas the O.P. clearly wants Divx or Xvid. But the cool thing is that it boasts converting 1:40:00 of source material in 0:20:00 with no big cpu/ram requirements.

Q. -- Is anyone making a hardware conversion accelerator like the AdsTech one, but which will convert to Divx, Xvid or any other useful format? If so, at what price?

The O.P. is throwing mega-thousands of $ of hardware at the problem (by using his killer server), but I wonder if there is a cheap alternative which will do the job better and faster. H.264, Divx and Xvid are all just flavors of Mpeg4 (I think, anyway), so it seems to me that there *ought* to be an accelerator for Divx/Xvid conversions which is about as fast and inexpensive.

[jagabo]

Canopus Firecoder for converting to MPEG 2 and 4:

http://www.canopus.com/products/FireCoder/index.php

[RabidDog]

try googling "plextor convertx". its hardware.
Your video card has no influence on encoding your videos. Your system with all that ram(!!) should blaze thru any conversion. ALso remember software like autoGK has an option to do one pass quality based encoding WHICH HALVES THE TIME REQUIRED but you do not know the exact size of the output file. Pentium D are very good server chips but rubbish for the environment.

Its your Dads machine really ???