Will a Faster Hard-Drive Speed Up My Encoding???

[xxmacabrexx]

I just upgraded my puter to an Athlon XP 1800+ running at 1.53Ghz and 1Gig of PC133 RAM. I can only notice a very small speed increase when encoding my VCD's from my old setup which was a PentiumIII 800Mhz with 256Megs of RAM. I am using a 5400RPM IDE hard drive and I thought that maybe this might be the problem. Would using a 7200RPM IDE or a SCSI Hard Drive increase the speed of my Encoding? Or is there something else I can tweak to get more speed???

[tgpo]

Try getting a mac. 8)

[xxmacabrexx]

Ha Ha. No thanks, WAYYYYYYYYYYY Too EXPENSIVE!

[Fred©]

No, it will not.... if you have an 5400rpm or 7200rpm, both UATA 66 or higher the speed is the same...

CPU and memory is the point! it is strange that an AMD XP is only little faster than your old P3-800MHz...

Have you configured the software you use to encode to use the new capabilities of AMD XP (3D Now enhanced, SSE instructions)?

Disable antivirus and screen saver, BIOS saver, etc...

Fred©

[xxmacabrexx]

Yes, all of the optimisations are enables in Tmpgenc. And I never have screensavers, or anti-virus software running. I hate anti-virus software.

[ktnwin]

There is no hardware upgrade needed in this case. The encoding speed should be reduced by almost 50% (solely CPU speed dependent).
Getting a MAC is the wrong thing to do in this case.
I would rather spend that money much more wisely: buy one standalone DVD recorder with half that money to spare.

[xxmacabrexx]

There is no hardware upgrade needed in this case. The encoding speed should be reduced by almost 50% (solely CPU speed dependent).
Getting a MAC is the wrong thing to do in this case.
I would rather spend that money much more wisely: buy one standalone DVD recorder with half that money to spare.

I hope you don't mind me asking, but what the HE|| are you talking about? A standalone DVD Recorder? I'm talking about encoding VCD's and SVCD's.

[Fred©]

Well,

If you motherboard support DDR memory, I suggest changing the PC-133 RAM to PC2100 or PC2700... the encode process works in memory and with DOUBLE RATE memory will be really FASTER than SINGLE RATE memory (SDRAM). Your up to date XP is underused with PC-133 RAM...

The difference in price is almost nothing... you can sell the old ones or change them if accepted by the reseller...

Fred©

[dgsmith]

Yes, it can make a pretty significant difference. I have a DMA100 drive 7200rpm, and a 10k scsi u2w. With the 100 drive, it takes approx 3:1 to encode vcd using tmpgenc and the 100 as source and destination. Using the scsi and the same setup, it takes 2:1. It does not matter what drive the OS is on. I have an Athlon 1800, 256 pc2100. Upgrading the RAM MAY help a little, but not alot.

The final speed of 1.5:1 I got by having the source on one hdd and the destination file on the other hdd.

1.5:1 meaning it takes 1.5 minutes to encode 1 minute of actual source.

[TomGR]

Well I had the same icrease in speed when I m using 2 dif HD for source and destination. I think thats the way to go. I ve tried my friends computer same configuration and a raid system and it was at least 25 to 30% faster

[HillJack]

I don't know how it works on your guys' systems that say HD speed makes a difference, but on MY system, when TMPGEnc is encoding a video my hard drive light barely blinks.

Unless your system encodes at realtime speed from a file (ie: a 1 hour capture takes 1 hour to encode), hard drive speed makes a difference with capturing the video only, not encoding it.

[tgpo]

I've never seen Mac's as too expensive. In fact I recently saw a comparison between a Sony Viao(sp?) and a new IMac. The IMac performed equally and in a few cases better than the Sony, yet costs half of what the Sony costs. Of course someone will come back saying Apple sucks, or something stupid, but everyone likes what they likes.

[xxmacabrexx]

I've never seen Mac's as too expensive. In fact I recently saw a comparison between a Sony Viao(sp?) and a new IMac. The IMac performed equally and in a few cases better than the Sony, yet costs half of what the Sony costs. Of course someone will come back saying Apple sucks, or something stupid, but everyone likes what they likes.

Sony??? Well a MAC might be cheaper thata Sony Vaio, but that's to be expected since the Sony Vaio series is one of the most expesnive proprietary pre-built systems you can buy. I am talking about a Hand-Built PC that is fast enought to blow the fastest Sony PC out of the water at alnost 1/4 of the price. Their alot cheaper when you build them yourself. Now if they made parts to build your own Hand-Made G4 MAC, I'd be all over it.

[poopyhead]

dunno wut the arguement is here, assuming someone has a limited budget and wants to decrease encode time, upgrading CPU would give you the "best bang for the buck"

while HDD, and RAM might affect encode time slightly, it's usually more noticeable if you're multi-tasking (i.e. encoding + doing something else like surfing the web, etc.)

if you're like me and leave the comp alone at nite while u're encoding, then RAM shouldn't be too much of a factor

(this is all assuming that you have at least a decent amount)

[xxmacabrexx]

I've already upgraded my system with RAM and CPU and it's still only A tiny, almost not-even-noticeable ammount faster/ I have an Athlon XP 1800+ running above 1500Mhz (it will run above 1700Mhz if I overclock it), and 1024 Megabytes of RAM here. And I can't get a shorter encoding timethen with a Pentium 3 800Mhz with 256 Megs of RAM.

[Fred©]

Yes, it can make a pretty significant difference. I have a DMA100 drive 7200rpm, and a 10k scsi u2w. With the 100 drive, it takes approx 3:1 to encode vcd using tmpgenc and the 100 as source and destination. Using the scsi and the same setup, it takes 2:1. It does not matter what drive the OS is on. I have an Athlon 1800, 256 pc2100. Upgrading the RAM MAY help a little, but not alot.

Well, hard disk only makes difference when you have little RAM installed, because, in this case, the process of encoding will be done in virtual memory disc cache... otherside all the encode will be done between CPU and RAM (physical RAM)... remember that encoding is a math process and the faster CPU is, the faster the process will be done... the same with the speed of the RAM... PC-133 is HALF the speed of PC-2100/2700, because is Single Data RAM (SDRAM) while PC-2100 is DOUBLE Data RAM (DDR).

Fred©

[xxmacabrexx]

So basically, I shoud ditch the current Mobo I have (MSI K7T Turbo2) and the 1Gig of Kingston PC133 RAm and buy a DDR based Mobo and some PC2100 RAM as well?

[poopyhead]

it's basically the CPU...the power of the CPU is the MAIN factor (i'm assuming you have the basic necessary amounts of RAM, etc...of course if you only have 65 MB RAM, then upgrading to 256 MB will be a godsend)

however, i.e. u have 256 MB RAM and 1 ghtz CPU, best bet is to spend money on upgrading the CPU rather than the RAM....when u have high loads of RAM, only thing they end up being good for is multi-tasking (i.e. if u run a lot of programs at once such as encoding, surfing, etc..)

[energy80s]

This is very true. I upgraded my PC from an AMD 500 to 1600XP processor and the encode speeds decreased by SEVEN times! This is with only 256Meg of PC133 RAM and 5400rpm HDDs. Fast speed HDDs are only for moving large amounts of data to and from them in a short space of time (ie. fast avi capping / firewire transfer) but are totally irrelevant for MPEG encoding.

So in answer to your question, NO, a faster hard drive won't speed up your encoding one little bit.

[vcdcheapskate]

hi, i also have the MSI K7T TURBO2 and an athlon xp 1800+, only 128MB of PC133 RAM, but i have a u100 7200rpm hard drive. I just upgraded from a 233Mhz Pentium II, so to say the least i have decrease my encoding time greatly. But when i hear about people encoding 1.5:1 near realtime speed i'm mad because my setup was nearly like theirs and yet i still have to wait like 6-8 hours for a 2hour movie.

That's when i use CCE and found out that i was already encoding at above realtime speed of 45fps. The reason that it still took long for me to encode was the fact that i was using multiple passes VBR to increase the quality and for every pass that CCE takes the number of frames to encode double along with the encoding time. I'm sure that if i was to use CQ_VBR, i would encode in realtime too since it only takes one pass. So the real question is how long am i willing to wait to get the quality of video that i'm satisfy with.

P.S. I'm planning on upgrading for more RAM, but not because i think that it will help me decrease encoding time, but because i need to increase my computer's multitasking capabilities like Poopyhead says..

[Greg12]

Alot of the freebee MPEG programs are written in Windows code


I've never seen a TMPGE Mac.

There r tons more programs for Windows PC's.

And Windows XP is a quantom leap in PC operation.

My computer now runs for 3-4 days at a time and rarly needs rebooting unless I do some major encoding or install something.

[tgpo]

There is no TMPGE mac. We have our own programs for Vcd, etc. creation. 3-4 days at a time, lol. My computer has been on non-stop since December. And who cares about the quanity of programs for Windows machines, quality is what counts.

[vitualis]

Exactly, and unfortunately for you Mac devotees, the best quality DVD Ripping/VCD authoring/creation programs are not on the Mac platform (e.g., DVD2AVI, FlaskMPEG, TMPGEnc, bbMPEG/Tools, VCDImager + GUIs, Panasonic MPEG Encoder, etc).

Okay, the great VCDImager does have a OSX version but burning a CUE/BIN image properly is not as easy on the Mac to the best of my knowledge.

DVD authoring is another story and the Mac world has an advantage there.

As for cost, Macs definitely cost more than PCs! Most enthusiasts can build their own PC cheaply. This isn't really an option for the Mac.

Regards.

[dmonty]

xxxmacabrexx,
Encoding is handled almost completely by the processor and the memory. The harddrive only comes into play after a section of video has been successfully processed in memory. The reason for this is that the HDD is a bottleneck. According to Kinston, the memory manufacturer, something that takes three and a half minutes to access in RAM would take four and a half months from your HDD. Just look at your HDD light, how often does it flash? If you want to speed up your encoding then try the following:

1) Do you use Win 9x/ME? Upgrade to XP! Win 9X/ME don't effectively use RAM in excess of 256MB. Your remain 768MB of RAM will go wasted.
2) Does you MB support DDR? If not then upgrade your MB or try testing different CAS latency settings in your BIOS. You might find that your MB and memory support aggressive memory timings.

Hope this helps

D