do core duo's allow 2x the speed, or 2x the number of jobs?

[nitrogen_widget]

I think you need to go back to the CPU performance tables at Tom's Hardware. It clearly shows that no single core cpu is faster than the Intel Core 2 Duo 6800.

I wrestled your dilema for quite a while until I started using a Dual processor system at work. I start a cpu intensive task and quess what I do not have to wait for it complete or schedule it for later when I am not there...I can still do other tasks including two cpu intensive tasks and that is a whole lot faster than doing two cpu intensive tasks in series.

Also, many video software apps will run more than one instance at a time. comskip will for example...also Dr DivX is setup to make use of both CPU's.

A sinlge core will not be that much faster than one core of a dual core but you will have the extra core to do more with.

Correct.
However certain video encoders are multi-threaded.
The H-254 encoder for instance.
The Tom's Hardware CPU charts show that it runs faster on dual-core cpu's.
Almost twice as fast in most cases.

I would rather hit a video file with a muti-threaded encoder & a dual CPU then try to encode 2 files at once with the same cpu because then you slow everything down with multiple read/writeing to the hard drives.

[bits]

Correct.
However certain video encoders are multi-threaded.
The H-254 encoder for instance.
The Tom's Hardware CPU charts show that it runs faster on dual-core cpu's.
Almost twice as fast in most cases.

I would rather hit a video file with a muti-threaded encoder & a dual CPU then try to encode 2 files at once with the same cpu because then you slow everything down with multiple read/writeing to the hard drives.

I did a little test:

Using WinFF to convert a 5 minute long 1080i ts file to NTSC DVD(SD mpeg2):

Processing two files at the same time (two instances of WinFF) = 255secs

Processing one file at a time = 237secs for one so two=474secs (back to back processing)

Writing to same HDD did not have much affect. So with the two CPUs I can convert two video files in 255secs and with one CPU it would take 474secs for the same two files.

[nitrogen_widget]

I did a little test:

Using WinFF to convert a 5 minute long 1080i ts file to NTSC DVD(SD mpeg2):

Processing two files at the same time (two instances of WinFF) = 255secs

Processing one file at a time = 237secs for one so two=474secs (back to back processing)

Writing to same HDD did not have much affect. So with the two CPUs I can convert two video files in 255secs and with one CPU it would take 474secs for the same two files.

I understand what you are getting at, but ffmpeg isn't a multi-threaded app.
Also, you only ran a 5 minute process.
If you took that 5 minute process & ran it to say convert a whole TV show or movie you're going to see a bigger percentage in the time difference between one encode & two encodes.

I'm almost sure of that.

I'm mostly interested in speeding up the process of encoding mpeg to h264.
My latest DVD RIP to h264 took about 7 hrs.
Ya, it took that long.
It was only an experiment to see what type of quality I could by ripping a DVD to fit on a CD.
The movie on this DVD was actually 5.5 GB's.
The quality was simply amazing.

However, I have no desire to leave my PC on all night or all day encoding a video like that on a regular basis.

That is why i'm only interested in using multi-threaded encoders with a dual core cpu.

[bits]

I understand what you are getting at, but ffmpeg isn't a multi-threaded app.
Also, you only ran a 5 minute process.
If you took that 5 minute process & ran it to say convert a whole TV show or movie you're going to see a bigger percentage in the time difference between one encode & two encodes.

I'm almost sure of that.

I'm mostly interested in speeding up the process of encoding mpeg to h264.
My latest DVD RIP to h264 took about 7 hrs.
Ya, it took that long.
It was only an experiment to see what type of quality I could by ripping a DVD to fit on a CD.
The movie on this DVD was actually 5.5 GB's.
The quality was simply amazing.

However, I have no desire to leave my PC on all night or all day encoding a video like that on a regular basis.

That is why i'm only interested in using multi-threaded encoders with a dual core cpu.

I think we are agreeing with each other...two cpus are better than one and yes IF you can get your hands on encoding software that is multi-threaded then by all means that is the way to go...heck why not go multi-threaded + 64bit!

BTW do you know of a multi-threaded 64bit encoder for h264?

H264 is a great video format and it is probably the future but in my situation it is not an option. Maybe late this year or in 2008 a NMP will come out that will play h264. For now I purchase cheap HDD space and leave everything as mpeg...cut commercials, watch and then delete.

What encoding times do you think you can achieve with what is available today? Seems like your looking something that does not exist yet....

Also, in my example your 7 hour encode for one file would take approximately 8.2 hours for two files if you were using a dual core and or dual processor system...given that each of the cpus in the dual were roughly the same clock speed as the single cpu.

[nitrogen_widget]

I'm only running a 1.8ghz Athlon 64 with 32 bit xp so a new cpu would probably be even faster just because it's cores are faster.

I'm not really sure how much speed I'd get out of a dual core with a multi threaded encoder.

Edit: i'm not about to buy a quad core set-up just yet, but the encode times shown for a pentium D that I consider affordable are pretty impressive with the right software.

http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=77020

[andrew_macaluso]

Frankly it just sounds cooler.

However, the silky smoothness when burning a cd while watching my favorite ren and stimpy on GBPVR and then checking my e-mail is always a plus!

[blizard]

I'm only running a 1.8ghz Athlon 64 with 32 bit xp so a new cpu would probably be even faster just because it's cores are faster.

I'm not really sure how much speed I'd get out of a dual core with a multi threaded encoder.

Edit: i'm not about to buy a quad core set-up just yet, but the encode times shown for a pentium D that I consider affordable are pretty impressive with the right software.

http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=77020

Just built out a Quad Core PC for Myself and decided to run a small test on Encoding A Scanner Darkly.
My old setup was a Pentium D 950 (3.4Ghz Stock) overclocked to 4.1Ghz, I gig of Ram, Motherboard Asus P5WD2-Premium, 3 WD HD 7200's with 8mb buffers.

My new setup Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66 Stock) overclocked to 3.09Ghz, 2Gig Ram, Intel BadAxe2 Motherboard 1 Raptor 150gb & 2 Seagate 7200.10 320gb Harddrives.

As you can see this person used a very high end CPU (QX6700) with WD Raptor 150 GB harddisk. That means that his harddisk run faster then most normal desktop harddisk would do. A Raptor run at 10.000 RPM while ordinary desktop harddisk has a speed at 7.200 RPM. This can be the reason why his encoding run faster and you would not see that good performance in trancoding from most other dual core machine of today.

My own Athlon64 4200+ (2200 MHz x2) take some time to finish a transcoding from MPEG2 to H.264, so I do most transcoding to Xvid (almost same quality, but in less time). In most cases I only watch it and delete MPEG2 as it take too much time to transcode.

I even tried to run two transcoding at once, but that would make system to crawl and I have two harddisk and 2 GB DDR400 RAM, so this is not the slowest system I have. My GBPVR can record in the background in most cases and it is the power of dual core that make this possible.

I think that dual core are over hyped to some degree. Yes, you can do more at the same time, but there are still limits even today for how much that can be done at once as harddisk is a very important limit for transcoding.

Athlon64 3000+ at 1800 MHz (skt 939) are among the slowest CPU from Athlon64 single core line, so you would see some improvement and with Core 2 Dou even more if you go for the faster type of those. There are some low end Core 2 Duo that might be cheaper, but not that fast on stock speed, so you have to make more research to make sure that you really upgrade.

You should also notice that the cost of motherboard can be higher for Intel based system (but they are going down to meet the price of AMD MB).

[nitrogen_widget]

I'm probably going to hold off on the upgrades.
I'll just deal with the time-suck for now.

As was mentioned, x264 is nice, but Xvid is good enough & faster.
I am looking at faster encoding because I have whole seasons of cartoons like samuri jack & the tick that I want to get off my server, however burning them to DVD requires more hands on then batch transcoding them to a smaller format & then burning them to a DVD as video files.

I have decided to just add another HD to my server & just run transcodes over night.

with the equiptment I have.