best Hardware for CCE

[emilius256]

Hi guys,
I got just a little question.
I'm going to buy a new PC and i'm asking wich is the best hrdware for CCE.
This is a list of what i'm thinking to buy:
AMD Athlon XP 1600
M/B GIGABYTE 7DXR+ AMD761 Raid DDRam AGP4X ATA133
256MB/512MB ram DDR
Video card Geforce 400mx 64MB with tv-out
HD 60GB ATA133

You think could be ok or i have to change something for better speed/quality ?

Thank you for any suggestions

Bye

[LB]

If you really want the BEST, then get dual AMDs.. CCE and TMPG (the main svcd encoding tools) utilize dual cpus. I bought DUAL 1800s and in CCE I now get 2.37 realtime and in TMPG IVTC utilizes 100% of both of my cpus on high mode so I can bust out a 2 hour movie IVTC in about 25 minutes. :)

LB

[emilius256]

is too expansive but thank you for the answer.

[Pko]

I think with another MB you perhaps can get more speed... I have an abit KR7A and I think is the best one for Athlon right now.

I even made a (very conservative) overclocking (not changing anything in hardware, just changing options in the BIOS) and now I get 1.2RT with CCESP with decomb 3.0 and PAL DVD interlaced -> PAL SVCD progressive conversion (I have an Athlon XP 1700)

[emilius256]

Thanks for suggestions.

bye.

[ou8thisSN]

Originally posted by LB
If you really want the BEST, then get dual AMDs.. CCE and TMPG (the main svcd encoding tools) utilize dual cpus. I bought DUAL 1800s and in CCE I now get 2.37 realtime and in TMPG IVTC utilizes 100% of both of my cpus on high mode so I can bust out a 2 hour movie IVTC in about 25 minutes. :)

LB

I have Dual AMDs also, but i dont see CCE using both CPUs, how did you turn it on? it goes around .97 realtime,
using 5-pass VBR;
max 2499;
min 1000;
avg max 2325;
avg min 1850.

on a 2:16 minute movie, it takes 14 hours....

PLEASE help me use both CPUs... or are they using it and its supposed to take this long?

[da franksta]

it uses both cpus automatically if you use w2k or wxp. What are your system specifications?

[ou8thisSN]

I have:
Tyan S2462 Thunder K7 mobo
1024megs DDR-SDRAM ECC-off, PC2100
IBM 60Gb 60GXP 7200rpm, formatted as FAT32 (would NTFS help?)
(2) AMD Athlons @ 1200mhz each
Geforce3

[da franksta]

Please tell me:
what is your cpu usage
what is your mem usage
no proggies on the background, right :sly:

in dvd2svcd most work is done by avisynth with its filters. Avisynth is not multiprocessor aware, so cpu usage doesn't get over 50%.
Add CCE, and you'll end up using 60-65% of your resources. This is normal.

As Tyan doesn't support tweaking in bios, you could probably get better speed after tweaking your memory softwarely. Take a look at the mobo thread in http://forums.2cpu.com
However, it is generally not recommended to overclock or tweak when video encoding, but you might be lucky. Personally, i get crc errors when i do.

ntfs will not get you better speed. a second harddisk will.

Good luck! :D

[ou8thisSN]

i get around 500-560 megs of memory usage when encoding, out of 1024megs total. and my CPU usage is exactly around what you said... so i guess i'm consistent, and its supposed to take as long as it does?

how do people, who claim they are getting 2.50rt or 2.00rt getting those speeds? are they just not encoding at such high resolutions or are they lying?

a second hard drive? you mean if i RAID stripe another hard disk it will be faster?

[BITS]

cce sp will not support dual cpu's from what i have read everywhere...the only version that does is the higher end version (cce-pro) that requires dual cpu's and also i believe some encoding hardware..but i could be wrong but this link says nothing about dual support
http://www.cinemacraft.com/eng/ccesp.html
but this one does
http://www.cinemacraft.com/eng/ccepro.html

ou8thisn...no another will not matter.

[ou8thisSN]

so do people who are getting 2.45RT using dual processosrs, using CCE Pro? is CCE-Pro compatible with DVD2SVCD?

[BITS]

i dont know...like i say im could be wrong and they could be using sp. my friend just bought a new vio and it has the pentium 2.4 i believe???cant remember but i know its a 2+ and he reads at cce sp speed of 2.11...or so he claims. When in doubt...ask for a screen shot ;p (are you good in photoshop ;p)

[da franksta]

don't let anyone fool you!
cce-sp does support smp, as does cce pro. the pro version comes with hardware (dual p3 if you must know) and is not designed for regular consumers. check the cinemacraft site.

i did a little test for you. converted a divx movie to mpeg2, NO frameserving. CPU usage 70-80% (not possible if not multiprocessor aware), mem usage +/- 260MB (of 1024), speed 3.8-4.0 RT.

you see, it's not hard to play with numbers. try it yourself, why don't you.

[BITS]

your getting 4.0 rt...what cpu's you got?? p4 or amd?..and what did you pay? because it sounds great ;p. These cpu's aren't xeons right...your not running a sgi right ;p. i would love to be in your shoes.

[lgcbmb]

im using cce-sp 2.50 on win2k.

looking in the encoding log shows the following:

---
Source : 120.412 seconds (2887 frames)
Elapsed: 143.997 seconds
---------------------------------------------------
>> File reading 3.055 2.121 %
>> Decoding 89.693 62.288 %
>> RGB -> YUY2 7.431 5.161 %
---------------------------------------------------
>> MPEG encoding 43.818 30.430 %
---

this is from encoding a 480x480 huffyuv_2.1.1 avi at 2600kbit cbr. file reading time goes from 2-10% for me depending on how fraged my drive is. im using a single drive for video read/write. decoding is interesting as this file takes 85% playing in wmp 6.4.. guess we know what the ms overhead is, heh. the rgb>yuv has to be done cause cce-sp_2.50 doesnt take huffyuv files without the "always suggest grb for output format" option set. this is annoying as huff is yuv so im being forced to do yuv>grb>yuv. maybe cce-sp_6.24 can take huffyuv files proper and save me another 5% on encoding. can anybody test this?

cce-sp_2.50 also seems to use program threads decently well. it seems to have separate threads for encoding/decoding/rgb>yuv. add the "threads" column to the task manager and watch the cctsp.exe process while encoding to see this in action. guess the best case would be equal cpu usage in two threads, which would take advantage of dual cpus well. seems to be more of a 60/30 in this case though.

[da franksta]

@BITS
2 AMD XP1700's on a tyan board :D
it's expensive but affordable ;)

[LB]

Well that speed sounds good. I'm assuming your 5pass is not using an uncompressed avi? If it isn't, then you are probably using some resize and other filters in the encode. To do a true speed test, just send a normal avi file compressed or uncompressed through. No filters or audio. That will give you a good indication of your speed. It will probably hit at least two. I am getting 2.388 when I set the process to high.

Hope that helps :)

LB

[LB]

all versions of cce support dual cpus. Why? Because of the way the program was constructed. I am not 100% sure about this, but i don't think its possible to disable support since pro and the regular version are basically the same. But either way. I used to have a 1.1ghz and got about 1.1RT in cce. Now with dual 1800s, I'm getting 2.39RT. Obviously the 700mhz jump is not what effected the dramatic increase, and i am using CCTSP. Just the plain old version.

Also, if you want to see if both cpus are being worked, close ALL applications, 100% of everything cept CCE. Run it, and then hit CTRL-ALT-DEL. It will bring up the process windows. Go to the PERFORMANCE tab. You should have two boxes, one for each cpu. If both are around 60-80% (the indicator) then you are currently using both cpus.

Both are active for me when I encode.

LB

[NenoX]

Originally posted by da franksta
Add CCE, and you'll end up using 60-65% of your resources. This is normal.
I have AMD 1GHz machine at home over a year. CCE encode at 0.75 (CPU at 100%) under DVD2SVCD. Now I bought dual PIII/1GHz and expect at least 1.0 but they work at 0.85 (CPUs at 63%).
Is it possible to force them to work with full power, I can't do anything until he encode.:(

NenadX

[da franksta]

@nenox
no, it's not possible. the thing is, cce is not taking up that much cpu time, avisynth is. because avisynth is not dual processor aware, it won't go over 50%.
if avisynth would have been incredibly fast, cce would have to work harder to keep up, and cpu usage would increase. sadly, this is not the case.

i don't know what you mean by "I can't do anything until he encode." the big advantage of having a dual processor system is that you can use your pc while encoding without noticeable effect.

take care :)

[LB]

It all boils down to threading. There is only so much information that a program has to send out to the cpus. Any version of CCE can take advantage of dual cpus, but if your processors are fast enough, you will eventually max out CCE. For my dual 1800s, I max at 65% for each cpu.

Also, if you want to get around avsynth, the easy way is to huffy an avi file. Encode your video to an uncompressed AVI file using the Huffy codec. It's lossless compression. A 20min segment (I encode anime) is usually 4gb, so do the math. You will have to encode it segmented in 2gb parts though. You can add them all into 1 encode in CCE though (it does support avi segments).

By doing that, you no longer are restricted by other programs that don't support dual cpus. So now CCE can fully utilize whatever ya got. By doing this, the speed 2.38 RT is totally legit. ;)

LB

[DaSilva]

So wich motherboard do you guys recommend for a dual Athlon XP 1800 system.
Athlon XP do run in dual systems I hope.
Otherwise I've read you have to do a little modding to one of the bridges to make em MP capable.

Thanks!

[jdobbs]

You can add them all into 1 encode in CCE though (it does support avi segments).

Do you mean by encoding each segment individually? I haven't found a way to make CCE read segmented AVIs as a single stream... forcing me to use AVISynth for frameserving.

[jeffy82]

I wondered that for a long time till I accidently figured it out.

THE TRICK:

"Add" 1st segment the normal way.

Doubleclick that line, bringing up the settings.

Click "Settings" Box -- This will open up what appears to be the original batch list, BUT IT's NOT.

Right click "Add" add the remaining segments - Make sure they are in the right order. (Or you can just Drag&Drop or Copy&Paste the avi segments into that window.)

Then click "OK" You will notice that your 2, 3, 4, etc movie segments are no longer shown as different line items. They are now reflected in that initial avi segment as an additional file.

I use CCE 2.50, and use this method often to get around 2Gig Limit. I first Segment by 10-15Gig AVI with Virtual Dub (Direct stream A/V & save segmented AVI) Takes a couple of minutes. I find this method is faster for me overall, and seems to be less problematic.

Jeffy82 ;)

[jdobbs]

jeffy82,

Great tip! This is exactly the kind of info that makes this forum worthwhile.

Thanks.

jdobbs

[LB]

I can provide screenshots if you want, but I can't give out the codec. I have a new hacked version of the Huffy codec that provides me with 3.45 RT in CCE. No loss in quality, and I run dual 1800's. My buddy gets 1.6 RT with his 1.1ghz AMD. Heh, so it is possible to get much better speeds with a different huffy codec.

LB

[bmb021]

I have a Gigabyte 7DXR+ board, 256MB DDR, 1.8G XP CPU, ATA 100 HD.
The best CCE RT is around 0.9-1.
I was wondering if somebody succeeded getting better results
and if so, what are the optimal configurations.

Thanks,
:angry:

[TRILIGHT]

Your speed sounds correct for your processor. I am running a P4 at 1.6Ghz and my encoding speed is usually 1.0-1.1. Spend 10+ hours using a crappy encoder like ReMPEG and you'll be begging for 0.9 CCE! :)

[jdobbs]

A lot of the speed depends on what you're feeding it and how. If I use AVISynth with the MPEG2DEC plug-in to feed CCE from DVD2AVI converted VOB files I get about 1.25 on my 1.3Ghz Athlon TB. If I feed using the VPAPI codec it drops to about 1.1.

On the other hand, if I'm converting a set of DV based .AVI files I'm lucky to get .6 - .8 as a number.

ReMPEG is like an ugly woman in a bar at midnight... you choose it as a last resort. Just as an observation, there seems to be a lot of folks on this forum that are ready to "go ugly early."

[TRILIGHT]

Originally posted by jdobbs
ReMPEG is like an ugly woman in a bar at midnight... you choose it as a last resort. Just as an observation, there seems to be a lot of folks on this forum that are ready to "go ugly early."

ROTFLMAO!!!! :D

BTW, jdobbs... Thanks for writing that ifoupdate util. I haven't used it yet but plan on trying it out on my next project. If it works out, it should prove very useful!