OS vs Encoding

[lamapoo]

Greet's to all...

I do alot of video encoding at work. Mostly convert DVD to AVI
and wmv for streaming. I was simply wondering what operating system is suggested for video encoding. I am currently using win XP PRO. It's seem to be working fine but another one of my co-workers said that I shouldn't be using XP for video encoding because it can cause system crashes (that I haven't experienced yet, at least not due to video encoding).

Thanx...

[mrlipring]

i haven't experienced anything like this. what os did he suggest?

[lamapoo]

He didn't suggest anything! As a matter a fact, he doens't know himself what I should be using. Personally, I think that XP works just fine. I was just posting to see if anybody else would know anything on the subject.

[lamapoo]

I'm sorry, I didn't ask the right question. Let me be more specific. I encode batches of movies. Up to 50 movies per batch. There are some media encoder jobs and virtual dub jobs (muxing & trimming movies into scenes). I talked to him again and he suggest using windows 2k for more stability.

btw. What resourses are essential to video encoding ( ie: ram, hd speed etc).

thanks

[killingspree]

hi,
honestly i do not think that there's going to be much difference between win2k pro and winXP pro. those are definitely recommended over the home editions aswell as WinME (and imho also Win98).
what's important is, that you use NTFS and not FAT32 as a file system!
so in other words, if you are running winXP right now, i wouldn't really consider downgrading to Win2k. if you're running a FAT HD, do yourself a favour and reformat (reinstall). same goes for WinME ;)

"btw. What resourses are essential to video encoding ( ie: ram, hd speed etc)."

well the most crucial part is of course the processor speed, but generally video encoding is one of the most straining tasks you can do with your computer. therefore i'd it is important that you have a well rounded up system with decent components that work together well. of course preformance is increased by fast HDs, faster (and in some cases more) Ram, higher processor speeds etc.

hope this helps
steVe

[lamapoo]

Thanks, this was very helpful. I won't have to reinstall the OS after all. As for the systems, I should be doing fine. I have 3 systems, identical, P4 2.8, 512 333 ram, 120gb 7200 hd, nvidia gforce 4 64 mb video card.

I also heard that I can make a cluster with these systems and make one "super computer". Will this make the video rendering faster, because I noticed that the fastest rendering rate I can get is between 35 and 45 fps on one of my systems.

Thanks

[communist]

Some VDubMod version had network distributed rendering (single pass only) - I couldn get it to work here.

Since you already have a p4 there is not much you can do to increase rendering speed (except overclocking / putting in the latest / fastest p4 CPU).

[ppera2]

Win XP has practically same kernel as Win2000. This is much more stable than Win98 or Me kernel. Plus, we have lot of software which even will not work on Win98/Me.

Reason for some problems could be that XP has more services activated than 2K. But it usually only slows down work slightly.

About hardware: I see only one thing which can improve it: putting in another HD drive and working with one as source and another as target will increase recoding speed. 100 € isn't too much...

Clustering: I think that it will give some results only with very fast network cards - Gigabit at least. There is big amount of data by processing video - this is reason why memory speed is so important.

[xmenxmen]

If you are working about crashes or such, avoid os updates unless needed as some system might cause whatever application you use to crash.

Also, to improve on your performance, I would suggest putting your hard drive on raid. Or at least mention above, use more than 1 drive to offload the read and write.

[Bishamon]

One way to increase HDD speed is to use the Software RAID in Win2000/XP Pro. Take two drives (preferrably on different IDE-channels) and convert them into dynamic disks (Control Panel > Admin Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management). Create a STRIPED volume on the dynamic disks. This is the same as a RAID 0 array. ZERO security but allmost double the speed...

I have tried it using two OLD SCSI disks, and it works.

(After benching with SiSoft Sandra 2003 MAX3, it looks like the striped disks were a performance DOWNGRADE! Atleast on my SCSI disks...)

[mrlipring]

when you're encoding or whatever, you're maxing out the cpu.

when you're using a software raid solution like you are describing, it uses the cpu to sort out where everything's going, so it'll slow things down, yeah.

if the pc was at idle, you'd probably get better performance over a single disc solution, but raid pci cards ain't expensive. better to get raid sata, or even scsi if you have a pile of cash.

[Zhnujm]

Or even better dont use RAID at all.
Reading from one and writing to another drive is faster than any raid solution (with the same disks of course)

[Bishamon]

Originally posted by Zhnujm
Reading from one and writing to another drive is faster than any raid solution (with the same disks of course)

Provided they are on separate IDE channels (disk 1 on PriIDE and disk 2 on SecIDE)... If they're on the same channel then one disk has to wait for the other to finish before it can continue etc... But then you get the next problem: Secondary IDE controllers aren't allways ATA-100/133, so then you lose performance there.

The best solution I think would be a 2-channel PCI64 SCSI320 RAID controller with a 3+ disk RAID 5 on both channels. Too bad it would cost more than you payed for your brand new wünder-PC just for the SCSI controller and disks...

[Zhnujm]

Its not that bad, the ide interface is much faster than a typical hd so one drive did not completely block the other.
for example i have 2 hds on one channel:
alone:
hd2= 19MB read/17MB write
hd1= 30MB read/29mb write

together:
hd2= 18MB read/17 write
hd1= 22MB read/19 write