Encoding hardware and bottlenecks

[tominator]

Hi
I work for a company who converts mpeg2-streams from retail DVDs to WMV-streams.

WMV-specs:
2 video streams 800+1500kbit/s CBR
1 audio stream 192 kbit/s 48khz CBR Stereo
Main profile
2 pass on both audio and video
Resolution: 640x360 or so depending on source AR.
Keyframe: 5s
Bufferwindow: 3000ms
Image quality: 90

Converting just one movie (90 min) to this spec with our current setup can take up to 10-13 hours. We are sure that it can be done a lot faster and hope that someone might be able to point out a bottleneck in our hardware or perhaps give us some information on what new hardware we should get.

What would give us the best performance compared to price when it comes to processors for encoding WMV?

One DualCore
Two SingleCore
Two DualCore


We are currently using the following setup:

P4 3.0 Ghz, 800 Mhz FSB

1024 Mb RAM, 266Mhz DDR2.

Integrated graphics (chipset i915p/915G)

Memory-specs:
CAS = 4
RAS -> CAS = 4
RAS precharge = 4

We get the following system usage stats:

CPU-time 99% busy

Available memory 36%

We reckon the CPU as being the bottleneck and therefore, when we purchase a new encoding-computer, we aim to get the most performance out of the CPU. Does this sound reasonable?

Also, are there any HW-encoding-cards for WMV-encoding? Or are the only encoding-cards available directed towards MPEG 2?

Sorry about the long post. We would sincerely appreciate any kind of help on this matter.

[Awatef]

You should get a dual core CPU, the AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ for example.
For WMV encoding, it is faster than a Core2Duo E6600 from Intel.

To give you an idea about the performance increase you would get, the X2 6000+ is about 75% faster than a Pentium D @ 3GHz (which is as you may know a double Pentium 4).

All other components look fine to me (You'll have to change the motherboard though to support the AMD CPU -of course-).

[tominator]

To give you an idea about the performance increase you would get, the X2 6000+ is about 75% faster than a Pentium D @ 3GHz (which is as you may know a double Pentium 4).


Thanks. Would you happen to have a reference for this? Like some kind of hardware comparison test or something.

[Awatef]

Here: (from the Tom's Hardware website)

http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/3667/mediaencoderstreamingve4.th.gif (http://img413.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mediaencoderstreamingve4.gif)

The Pentium D 930 is the one that is clocked at 3GHz.

[Edit]
I may add that the Pentium D 930 is about 50% faster than the P4@3GHz, which means that you can expect the X2 6000+ to be about 2.3 times (115%) faster than your actual P4.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Well, if you want very high speed (and this is all dependant on whether or not the Windows Media encoder is very well threaded), get a quad core :) They're dropping in price to under $500 for the c2q6600 soon, which is quite affordable considering the performance! x264 benefits very well from a quad.

CPU speed more than anything else is where video encoding bottlenecks. Sometimes you are limited by hard drive I/O (with uncompressed HD for example), but for most stuff, and especially DVD work, the CPU is king. RAM clocks and timings make little relative difference.

~MiSfit

[setarip_old]

Hi!a company who converts mpeg2-streams from retail DVDs to WMV-streams.How is this legal?