So a friend of mine just purchased his first ps3, and he has decided he wants to have a central storage area for all his media, so he can access it through his time capsule for his macbook, his ps3 in his basement, the home network, and have that same pc serve as a playback box for his family room... Currently, he plans to throw 4x dvd drives into it, to rip his dvd's and re-encode them, but thats the problem. He says they take a while to encode. It takes him about 1 hour on his dual core 2.4 ghz, 4gb ram mb pro, and the pc he wants to convert into the media center is as listed: p4 prescott - 3.0ghz, 800 mhz fsb. 478 mobo 1 GB ddr400 I believe x850 xt platinum addition graphics card 500 watt enermax psu If he was to turn it into his idea, he already has a case, cd drives, and power supply readily available, but if he was to upgrade to a slower clocked quad with 2 - 4 gb of slower ddr2 ram, would he see a large increase in encoding times? Also, what would be a good quality card for a fairly low cost, doesnt mean the cheapest that will do it, but one that does it very smoothly without any troubles for blu-ray playback... Since we want blu-ray playback, i assume hdmi is needed on the card or dvi to hdmi, along with some sort of decent sound card? Right now there are no quaranties of him doing this, unless it will cost a reasonable amount, as he can see the benefit of doing this, but can't justify upgrading his current encoding machine if he's only going to see minor speed improvements... Basically, whats important for encoding, and any relative / loose hardware recommendations... Thanks a bunch
On the subject of 4 DVD drives in his computer... A DVD drive can only rip a DVD as fast as the drive will let it... Unless you rip the DVD to the hard drive first, the maximum speed you can re-encode the DVDs depends on the DVD drive itself. That being said, re-encoding from the same hard drive as the source file will be slower than ripping to one hard drive, and encoding to another hard drive from the first. For the best performance, rip the full DVD disk to HDD 1, then re-encode from HDD 1 to HDD 2. Having multiple DVD drives doesn't help speed up the process any really. Honestly, if you want a PC to act as a media server, you shouldn't use it for encoding as well... Streaming video (especially HD content) is rougher on a CPU than you'd think. If you pair that with trying to encode video (or doing anything else CPU intensive for that matter), you'll end up with the whole PC lagging to death. If he's interested in speeding up his rendering times, I'd point him to this: http://www.bit-tech.net/modding/2004/08/21/9ghz_rendiathon/1 Basically to sum it all up... Build a media PC for the family room. Build a media server for streaming and storing content. Build a rendering / encoding machine or cluster for converting DVDs into MPEG2 files. Make sure all of the computers have a good gigabit network card, connected to a good gigabit router / switch. I know it's not the cheapest way to do it, but the specs above aren't quit up to par for streaming, or encoding video... It would be okay for playback of DVDs, but not so much on the HD content.
I myself have 2x spare p4 1.7ghz, 512 mb of ram, and a geforce 4 graphics card plus 2 "el-cheapo" 300 watt psu's... that would sure help him out as I have them sitting in a box... I'm sure that would be pretty beneficial for a small render / encoding farm
