Increasing Encoding Speed?? What Hardware makes it run faster?

[sandman423]

Just was wondering because I do so much Video Encoding with ConvertXtoDVD and It takes about an 1 1/2 Hours for 4GBs so I was just wondering...


Which hardware would I be looking into or is there none??

I heard that different hardware can increase encoding speed but I was never told specifically which part of the computer would make encoding faster....I know there is options for Quality/Speed inside the programs but I am just talking basic encoding...In TMPGEnc it takes sometimes 4Hours to encode video which is a nightmare...

I was just wondering because I make a lot of DVDs with my own videos and I am looking to improve the speed so it would be easier to make more DVDs in a shorter amount of time...

[freebird73717]

Upgrade your cpu would give the bigest increase in encoding speed.

Tmpgenc is one of the slowest encoder out there.

You might look into hcenc. Quality is comparable to CCE, it's faster than tmpgenc, and it's free!

[redwudz]

What freebird73717 said. Encoding speed is almost entirely dependent on CPU speed. If you are using the computer listed in your computer details, it's fairly fast. You could upgrade to something closer to a 3Ghz CPU, or look into a AMD quad core CPU, if your motherboard can utilize it. Either would give you some speed increases.

Even with a dual core, the encoder program can make a big difference in speed. Some codecs can use all available cores, such as Divx. That's not as common with MPEG-2 encoding. The newest beta version of ConvertXToDVD seems to offer some speed increases. For other encoders, as mentioned, CCE and HC are both considerably faster than TMPGEnc.

If the HC setup seems a bit daunting, try the freeware FAVC. It can use HC and works similar to ConvertX.

[lordsmurf]

CPU.
Hard drive configuration comes next (don't encode to the same drive as source ... or even the same IDE channel). Use good encoding software or hardware.

Please note that "fast" and "good quality" don't always co-exist either. You can have one, but not both.

[Nilfennasion]

Just to echo here: CPU speed.

However, given the hardware listed in your profile, you might have to spend a pretty penny to get a noticeable saving in encoding times. Or not. Either way, doing a lot of research is advised before you spend anything.

[Soopafresh]

Did anyone mention CPU ?

[Nilfennasion]

I think that doggy in the window did a couple of times.

[Noahtuck]

Did anyone mention CPU ?

as a matter of fact... no... i do not believe so......


:P

[zoobie]

just encode overnight while you sleep
it will make it seem faster...

[src2206]

AMD 64 X series CPUs are very good, but slow on encoding. But I do not think that there will be much increase even if you switch to Intel. What I would suggest is to get another stick of RAM. I am not entirely sure, but if the latest version of CX2D supports multi core CPUs then higher RAM will benefit you. As because, even if the encoder offloads the tasks and try to go faster using multi tasking mode, it will face a bottle neck in terms of memory bandwidth. Your RAM is just enough I would say, for normal usage.

A RAM upgrade won't cost you much, but will give you a great performance boost.

[guns1inger]

As pointed out, the current (version 2.x) of ConvertXtoDVD is not multi-threaded/Multi-CPU aware, so on a dual core it will lock to one processor and that's it. Version three, currently is RC testing, will use both cores, and should produce substantial speed increases.

In the mean time, FAVC/HCEnc will use multiple cores. I can run a complete and higher quality encode using predictive quantisation across four cores in 15 minutes, with a full movie encoded an authored in under 30 minutes from start to finish.

So while a faster CPU would certainly make a difference, using software that can properly make use of your hardware will also help a lot.

[harley2ride]

This chart http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/16/cpu_charts_2007/page26.html
will give you some idea of differences between processors for encoding. There are other charts in this article for HD encoding, audio encoding, etc. This is just as a reference.
Personally, I have been doing all of my encoding on a p4 3.4ghz system with 3gb of memory. I just updated to a c2d e6550 with 4gb of memory. I haven't had a chance to do some comparison encodes yet, but I plan to. I plan on taking the same avi file, use the same software programs, and run it on both pc's at the same time.

[redwudz]

I doubt you will see much, if any, increase in encoding speed by adding lots of RAM.

My quad core CPU with Vista, running FAVC with all four cores at about 100% shows about 400MB RAM usage by the encoder out of the 2GB available. That's the same as one of my dual cores CPUs on XP with 1GB of RAM.

If you only had 500MB of RAM with either platform, you would likely see some improvement, but only because other processes could use the RAM, not the encoder. For encoding, 1GB seems sufficient with XP, 2GB with Vista. It still comes down to CPU power.

BTW, FAVC is fast with all four cores working. I like seeing 160fps encoding speed.

[Paul_G]

Get rid of TMPGEnc, it was great in the vcd/svcd day but for dvds the very slow encoding time compared to others is unforgivable. I personally use CCE with CCEfront for high bitrate and HC for low bitrate.

[src2206]

Moreover anything over 3GB of RAM will not be recognized by 32 bit version of XP.

[RabidDog]

Even with your current setup and the SAME software you could halve your encoding times!!
Simply split your source file into two halves and set two encoding jobs going with each set to run on one core.
Otherwise an Intel Cpu (65xx) with dual channel memory might help plus better faster software.