MPEG2 encoding speedup (Pinnacle Studio)

[Dust Signs]

Hi,

my dad creates DVDs (for the vaulting association my little sister is a member of) out of DV material. He bought Pinnacle Studio 10 (http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/de/Products/Consumer+Products/Home+Video/Studio+Family/Studio+500-USB+version+10) which is quite easy to handle. The only real problem is that he has a really old laptop with few RAM and a quite slow CPU - the encoding of one hour DV material which is already on his harddisk takes him more than five hours.
He is now thinking about buying a new PC - and the question is: do multiple cores speedup MPEG2 encoding? I couldn't find out yet which encoder is used in the program, so this question is quite difficult to answer. On my current PC (So939 Athlon 64 X2 4200+), the encoding is about three times faster than on his (which is nevertheless slower than realtime). Which factors (CPU speed, CPU cache size, RAM) can speedup the encoding speed of this MPEG2 codec? It has not necessarily to be realtime speed - the speed I currently achieve he said would be sufficient. The question is now: are two cores necessary or would one core do just fine (meaning it would make no significant difference)?
He plans to buy a very cheap PC (maybe 500 or 600€) and I ask myself if a dual core is worth buying in this case or if there are other criteria to pay attention to...

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[Corion]

I believe that you should be most interested in processing power. As for the dual core question, you will need to check whether your dad's pinnacle software is capable of encoding MPEG2 in a multi-threaded manner. Otherwise a second processor will be largely redundant.

A link:

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/cpu/article.php/3261_3608396__6

[Dust Signs]

Thanks for the link. I installed the software on my PC again and noticed that my CPU has only 50% load. That tells me that the encoder is not able to profit from multiple cores ;). So I think I'll buy a single core. Can someone recommend me a single core processor which is not so expensive, but has enough power to encode the video as fast as my Athlon 64 X2 4200+?

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[Dust Signs]

Due to the fact that the dual cores are no more really more expensive than the single cores, I assembled the barebone which you can find attached for my dad. I couldn't really believe that it was possible that you can really get a quite fast computer for only 500€ :)

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