Multi Computer avi 2 mpeg2 encoder

[BJ_M]

OR JUST BUY SONY VEGAS 5 -- which has network rendering ...

so does apple shake and digital fusion

[cgentry]

Well I'm really not wanting this for home video. I'm backing up all my VHS collection to dvdr. Hundreds of movies. I figured if I could get something that would encode a full length movie into a dvd ready stream in about an hour I would be happy. Over the length of my collection it would be nice to save those extra hours of time.

[BJ_M]

Well I'm really not wanting this for home video. I'm backing up all my VHS collection to dvdr. Hundreds of movies. I figured if I could get something that would encode a full length movie into a dvd ready stream in about an hour I would be happy. Over the length of my collection it would be nice to save those extra hours of time.

well if you are going from tape - you can only go at real time speed -- otherwise how are you going to capture it ?

and its no big deal to capture to a mpeg2 , dvd ready stream in real time with existing software and / or hardware .

even if you had 100 render boxs .. you still only can go real time unless you got some really special vhs player that plays perfectly at double speed with audio (there isnt one) ..

[cgentry]

I use pinnacle to capture my movies. It only captures in dv format. Since the hardware is proprietary I cannot use another software to run it. There is a way where you can convert the movies from dv format to dvd images, but it is really lame. The features are just not there.

[BJ_M]

get a new capture device then --

say you have to capture 200 hours worth of tape --your way =

200 hours + (overhead for swapping tapes) + render (100 hours at 2x speed) = ~325 hours (about the absolute BEST you can hope for)

PLUS that assumes you have room to capture all that and/or can capture and encode same time so you can keep deleting ..

or the better way


capture 200 hours in real time to mpeg2 plus overhead = ~225hours

[tonsofpcs]

Or you can even buy a standalone DVD Recorder at this point, the prices are dropping.
Also, can't you access the Pinnacle card as a WDM device??

[mp3boy]

1.) I currently have only 3 computers on my LAN. Would the extra overhead of putting (on average) 25GB avi files over the network be slower than if I just used TMEPGenc?
If I used the computer lab at college, I could use around 20 computers, so this wouldn't be as bad.



It will already take 34 minutes at zero traffic network to send 25 gb of data to another computer, Using TCP is much slower than IPX, however if you have 3 computer and 1 computer is your server which you will be left with another two computer which you are sharing same network to both however if in your network topology you have private connection from clients to server (means one network slot per client on your server connected with PC2PC utp cable) you will split that 34 minutes to half which is reasonable. but 34 minute I can say you are on the edge of doing original job by same machine however TMPGEnc at best performance for 2 hour movie (25GB) will take apprximately 6 hours which 34 minutes for transfering raw frame is still okay but your client may like to do it FAST which on single machine will be even faster.


2.) Can you break avi files into individual frames and then encode them like I want? I know I might need to send more frames than actually necessary to the client, but I can drop these frames at the client so I don't need to send them back.

TMPGEnc doesn't have this facilities however you can manually copy your source to each machine and make a job to encode from certain frame to certain frame per client and at the end to join all mpg result file together. (or even AVI)


I've researched a few programs, but is there anything out there that does this already? Or can you point me to some open source applications that does somewhat what I want. (basic encoding)

I've been doing video encoding for so long and I haven't seen such thing however I plan to make one if I have time :P

Hope it helps
Seyed Mohammad

[mp3boy]

Hi,
I've been doing some research on mpeg2 encoders. I haven't found very much that was easy to understand, so I'm looking for help here.

What I'm wanting to do is create a client/server configuration for a local area network. The server would break an avi file into x number of frames and send these frames out to the clients. Each client would then encode these frames into mpeg2 streams and send them back to the server. The server would then put it all back together and write it to disk.

I do have some questions on the feasibility of these programs.

1.) I currently have only 3 computers on my LAN. Would the extra overhead of putting (on average) 25GB avi files over the network be slower than if I just used TMEPGenc?

If I used the computer lab at college, I could use around 20 computers, so this wouldn't be as bad.

2.) Can you break avi files into individual frames and then encode them like I want? I know I might need to send more frames than actually necessary to the client, but I can drop these frames at the client so I don't need to send them back.

3.) I've researched a few programs, but is there anything out there that does this already? Or can you point me to some open source applications that does somewhat what I want. (basic encoding)

Following is some pseudocode on this: (Basic idea only)

Server system:
_________________________
Start

Setup sockets
Create buffers
Open avi file
Read avi file
Fill buffers (attach headers here, so we know what frames we have -sequences)

Start LOOP
Send out packets to clients in the ready state

Receive completed packets
Strip headers
Join packets

Sanity check (see if packets have been out for to long)
If they haven't returned in awhile, send a cancel message and
resend packet to another client.

Check total processing time
Output elapsed time, time remaining.

Clean completed frame buffers
Read Avi file
Fill frame buffers

End Loop

Clean up

STOP
____________________

Client p.code

____________________

START

Create buffers
Log into server and send "READY" response

Loop

Receive packets

Send "HOLD" response to server

Process packet (Encode)

Send finished packet back

Cleanup Buffers

Send "READY" response to server

end Loop

Cleanup

STOP

______________________

[BJ_M]

mp3boy

VEGAS 5 can do this ...

[Ufit]

Hmmm. Well all above sounded interesting. I'd say encoding as Mr. cgentry wants is not efficient and useless. Currently I'm in deep mpeg2 decoder analyzing process and I say shortly: damn complex crap. Found other examples of GNU work but that's just rewrittten other GNU crap and some of parts instead of C/C++ use inline assembler what actually makes program hardly possible to analyze. What I know using assembler can icrease maybe 15 max 20% speed. Sometimes even decrease. All transport mpeg2 streams many times loose parts of information because of big size. IMHO this kind of encoding that was discussed above is just wrong dude.

[mats.hogberg]

I'm not sure of this, but have a look at the Linux app DVD::RIP that's used to rip and encode DVD video to AVI/SVCD/VCD. I think there's an option to encode using one master and several slave computers. This might lead you in the right direction...

/Mats