Optimum PC Spec for TMPGenc AVI/VCD conversions???

[Digeeboy]

Time to replace the PC - looking for advice on what spec to look for. I spend vast amounts of time downloading avi files then having to convert them to vcd format. I can't speed up the downloading but I'm sure something could be donw about the conversion bit.

Any advice on cpu / memory / hard disk and any other bits that may affect the conversion process would be gratefully received!!

Alan

[larsli]

Did my first conversion with my Athlon XP1900+ (256MB RAM and ATA-100 7200RPM 60GB disk) and was totally amazed by the speed! I converted 2 XviD files (both 700MB) to VCD with tmpgenc in about an hour. My old Celeron 300A would use about 15 hours to do the same!

[offline]

money no object?

dual Xeon cpu with intel server m/b, 1024 ECC sdram, 2x30Gig 10k SCSI

[mats.hogberg]

Not surprisingly:

• The fastest (in MHz) processor possible
  Loads of RAM (min 512)
  2 of the fastest HDD's possible

What's possible depends on you budget, and current state of technology

/Mats
PS! Or maybe go for a hardware encoder? DS

[THE RIPPER]

i'm selling a dual athlon rig, very quick at encoding, check my specs

[epo]

Why fast HDDs for encoding ??? Loads of RAM, I don't object, but am quite curious, why, and have doubts about this. Fast RAM, yes. Fastest possible processor(s) too.

[Digeeboy]

larsli - was that with the quality setting set to 'High' or above?? It takes me around 10 hours at the moment for one 700Mb conversion (P500)

offline - unfortunately not, unless I send the kids out to work!

Alan

[mats.hogberg]

epo - Not for the encoding as such, but there's a lot of data that's gonna be moved around (and preferably be there on time), so high data rate HDDs will help. But most critical is definately the processor.

/Mats

[epo]

What do You mean with "on time". I myself capture MPEG-2 @8Mbps , trim, remux, burn and live quite well with dual 5400rpm IDEs (one is even DMA-66). It takes 1.5 h to capture, 0.5 to edit/remux and 1 to burn, so drive speed is quite irrelevant even with DVD, but meningless with DiVx(what else is there to download?)-VCD conversion. Dual drives are good in any case.

[Digeeboy]

epo - dual drives, yes I'll add that to my list of requirements.

Thanks