Multitasking while ripping/encoding/burning

[Khambatt]

This may be a very newbish question .. but will there be any quality problems if I do other things during the ripping, encoding, or burning process?

I have been capturing video from either my Leadtek Winfast TV 2000 XP Expert card as a PVR or as a straight capture card, as well as burning those to DVDs using NeroVision Express SE or Uleads DVD Movie Factory. I've also been authoring (Editing) the captures with Ulead's VideoStudio SE, taking out commercials or whatever.

SO the question is if I am ripping one of those DVDs again to copy it, or if I am letting it encode from my original capture to a new MPEG or AVI that's been edited, or if i'm burning the files to a DVD, can I do other things and not worry about hicups in the process, or distortion or whatever? Or if it's doing anything related to the ripping/encoding/burning process should i just leave the PC alone (which is like 2 hrs per process or MORE, so basically i lose use of my pc until it's done)

Breakdown of the system:
P4 2.6 ghz with 800 mhz fsb hyperthreading yaddie thx Dell. Currently 512 megs of ram, another 512 megs on the way for Monday. 1 160 gig HD and 1 40 gig hd. Windows XP home, DVD drive combo CDRW Burner, DVD + RW burner, GeForce4 4200 128 meg agp card, leadtek winfast tv 2000 xp Expert capture card
Thanks!!!

[killingspree]

hi,
well i think you shouldn't have any problems doing non cpu intensive tasks parallel to encoding/editing etc. even cpu intensive tasks won't hurt your encode, but remember that if you take away cpu time from the encoding process, you'll have to deal with longer encoding times.

the only task during which i wouldn't touch the computer is capturing. since this process basically can't be slowed down, you will most likely have to deal with dropped frames if you use up too much cpu time. and this results in actual lost quality.

hth
steVe

[shevegen]

on my rather old AMD Athlonx XP 1533 with 256 RAM
i continually ran into more problems when the CPU was working very hard.
At times it just crashed (printed some blue screen and white letters on it hehe).

I could multitask though and it didnt result in quality problems, but as it crashed every now and then i usually started the task, then left to do sth else