64Bit Encoding?

[pilot550]

I'm building a new computer and thinking about going with 4 Gig of RAM over 2. If I do that I'm going to have to go with Vista x64. Is there any advantage to encoding with a 64 Bit operating system? I encode mostly to Xvid and MKV. Does going from 2Gig to 4Gig even make much of a difference? Thanks.

[Tagert]

Well you could use Windows XP x64 as well :)
That's what I do and I've got 4gigs of ram as well.

I noticed a slight faster boot with 4gigs in, but not much.
But if you work alot with encoding and sony video vegas/ adobe premiere/ or many high resolution pictures in photoshop then 4gigs is an advantage yeah :)

Also it's a good investment anyways now when ram is so cheap!


I don't use any 64bit programs/encoders/etc when encoding though as I've heard the performance gain isn't that great at the moment.

[pilot550]

I didn't even think about XP 64bit edition. Do you ever have any compatibility problems with any programs running on a 64bit OS? I thought I remembered people having compatibility issues with 32 bit programs in XP 64 when it first came out.

[foxyshadis]

At this point it's better imho to get Vista x64 just because XP x64 is nearly abandoned by driver makers. A lot of drivers will work in both, but audio and video drivers have to specifically target both (and the XP x64 specific support has always been lousy, even after Vista x64 showed up). On the other hand, XP is a little lighter on resources than Vista, if you'd even notice with 4 gigs.

You'd probably notice a number of performance gains just by using 64-bit software chains. 5-10% is normal. The times I've run x64, I've never had a problem with 32-bit compatibility, personally, but I didn't do any gaming on it.

[pilot550]

I think I will go with Vista x64. I'm hoping that the extra 2 Gig of RAM will mitigate the performance hit coming from XP. With a couple tuners running in the background recording HDTV while gaming or encoding I'm starting to think 2 Gig of RAM won't be enough. Thanks for the help.:)

[blizard]

I think I will go with Vista x64. I'm hoping that the extra 2 Gig of RAM will mitigate the performance hit coming from XP. With a couple tuners running in the background recording HDTV while gaming or encoding I'm starting to think 2 Gig of RAM won't be enough. Thanks for the help.:)

If your tuner have hardware encoder for analogue tuner or digital broadcasting DVB/ATSC which is either in MPEG2 or in H.264 you would not see a difference with more memory. It is only when you use many application or large file taht must be loaded into memory to work with that you will notice a gain with 4 GB.

I would rather use money on a faster hard disk with more space (=higher density on media) as you will make use of hard disk more often. If you are building from scratch your new system, then it would be better to put money into a fast CPU or quad core system.

You can try out for free windows xp 64 bit edition: Link (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/facts/trial.mspx)

Here is a list over HDTV tuner and support for 64 bit: link (http://www.hdtvtunerinfo.com/comparetuners.html)

[pilot550]

Thanks Blizard. I have a ATI 650 Hybrid for recording analog and a HDHomeRun to record HDTV over the air. The ATI has a hardware mpeg encoder so I get mpg extensions for that. When I record HDTV OTA with the HDHomeRun I get a .ts extension. Is that a H.264 file format? An hour show usually takes up a little over 4 Gig. Sometimes it gets a little crazy and I get an 8.5 Gig file with 2 HD video streams? Virtualdub-mod and Virtualdub-mpeg2 won't read it. If it is a H.264 format what is the best way to separate the streams?