Any way to speed up encoding?

[sliver]

Encoding takes a lot longer than I thought it would. I was wondering if there's hardware (PCI cards, AGP cards?) that are specially designed to assist in mpg encoding. A hardware encoder, perhaps.

I was also wondering if there's such a things as "distributed encoding". We've got about 4 computers in this room, and it would be cool to use a parallelizing encoder.

Also, what is the equivalent of TMPGEnc tools on Linux? I keep hearing that TMPG and CCE are the best tools on Windows. Is there anything of comprable quality on Linux? I only care about quality, not usability. In fact, I've always found that as usability goes down, my level of understanding has to necessarily go up.

Thanks!

[Nick]

There are video capture cards that will do hardware mpeg compression but as far as software encoders go, a fast processor and loads of memory are the way to go to increase speed.

CinemaCraft Encoder can be parallelised acriss a network of PC's in the way you describe.
I heard a while ago of some software called CCE Farm for this purpose.
If your encoding is DVD backups, you might want to try RB Farm.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=74801

Can't help on Linux - not my arena but there is a separate Linux forum here.

[708145]

Encoding takes a lot longer than I thought it would. I was wondering if there's hardware (PCI cards, AGP cards?) that are specially designed to assist in mpg encoding. A hardware encoder, perhaps.

I was also wondering if there's such a things as "distributed encoding". We've got about 4 computers in this room, and it would be cool to use a parallelizing encoder.

Also, what is the equivalent of TMPGEnc tools on Linux? I keep hearing that TMPG and CCE are the best tools on Windows. Is there anything of comprable quality on Linux? I only care about quality, not usability. In fact, I've always found that as usability goes down, my level of understanding has to necessarily go up.

Thanks!

On Linux you should try DVD::RIP. It has a cluster mode and supports a large variety of codecs.

Handbrake is nice, too.

bis besser,
Tobias

[Pookie]

You can farm jobs out to your several machines using DVD Rebuilder's distributed network mode. The other option is to split up your source file and copy parts to the various machines for encoding. If you know batch files, it will be pretty easy to set up.

Some apps which will benefit you:

UltraVnc http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net

PStools http://www.sysinternals.com

BeyondExec http://www.beyondlogic.org/solutions/remoteprocess/BeyondExec.htm

Use ffmpeg.exe or HC or Quenc for your mpeg2 encoder, since they can all be accessed from the command line. All of these encoders rival the big boys in quality.