Blu-ray Encoding

[uberprinnyakatux]

Hello, I have quite a few movies, I do own them of course and have backed all my DVD's so I do not have to worry about damaging them. The software I have also does blu-ray. However I have come to realize that it takes way too long for one movie, about 8 hours for a movie that takes up 19 GB on the disk. This machine was purchased off of craigslist so I got it for a reasonable price, and do a lot with it but would like more of an expert opinion on the subject. I do run some virtual machines from time to time using VMWare server, just so I can use my images with the school computer, and I have few issues with that.

However my question is would upgrading the processors and / or using a graphics card with cuda help me more than going with a different architecture. The motherboard is a Tyan S2915 and is a Reference version, the two processors are Opteron 2216 HE's they operate at 2.4ghz and I have 8gb of memory I have a raid card for my hard drives and an old nvidia 5500 serving up the graphics.

My research shows this board only being able to go to the shanghai processors which are the quad core. I have tried looking up to see what desktop grade chip all of these processors compared to but was hitting many walls, the shanghai cips seem to resemble a mid range phenom II however I could be wrong, also cuda did not turn up much for information. I have a friend that says it does help a fair bit but not sure if it would even be worth my time. I can pick up a pair of them off of ebay for about 300 total after shipping, they are the 2.4ghz shanghai cores, I can dig out the models if needed. But I would just like to be able to not have to wait so long, since I have only tried it with older blu-rays and I could only imagine a newer movie with more content on the disk. Also as a side note I do copy the disks to the hard disk before encoding since it goes way faster and allows me to experiment with settings easier. Thank you for any help I may receive.

[Infiltrator]

Encoding videos, music and other multimedia tasks demands a lot of processing power. And in order to use Nvidia Cuda, the software will need to be optimized to take advantage of the Cuda cores.

I know for a fact that, Cyberlink PowerDiretor has been optimized for Cuda. You can check it out, at this link

http://www.cyberlink.com/products/powerdirector/features_en_US.html

Also if you want to get good encoding performance out of your machine, you may want to look into upgrading your CPU to a faster one, as well as perhaps upgrade your HDD to a SSD.

[uberprinnyakatux]

Yeah I was just not sure of how much of a speed gain I would get from going from two dual cores to two quad cores. Because if the speed increase is minimal I would just bear with it. The software I use does support cuda, DVDfab. I have a friend that is going to let me use a gts 250 so I will give that a go and see for myself since I cant seem to find any comparisons on the subject.

[Infiltrator]

In your computer how long would it take to encode a blue ray film?

[uberprinnyakatux]

It takes around 8 hours for a 19gb movie, I also looked at the hard drives and I tried a single drive vs my raid 5 and also a wd raptor hard drive and all had about the same amount of time. I brought up the resource monitor and that told me about 97% of the time the hard drives I was using was idle.

[Infiltrator]

I could see some really good results, if you had a SSD, an I7 CPU and a nvdia graphics card. Those 8 hours would turn into a couple of hours or less.

You might want to look into upgrading your gear.

[uberprinnyakatux]

So I'm S.O.L. and need to upgrade... So what about this processor? My motherboard is this, just so you know, I'd like to exhaust my options before considering to replace this rig. I know where to look for getting information on desktop processors but since these are technically server chips there is little information on it. Sorry if I am being a bug and thanks for the help again.

[Infiltrator]

No need to apologize its perfectly normal to ask questions.

I checked the compatibility between your board and CPU, it should work without any issues. Since your motherboard has support for 6 cores CPU you can always upgrade to that in the future.

You current CPU supports virtualization, so you shouldn't have problems running any virtual machines. The only thing, I did't like much about this CPU, is that it doesn't seem to support hyperThreading, which most Intel Xeon CPUs does.

Are you running dual processors or just a single processor on the board?

[uberprinnyakatux]

I am running 2 cpu's.

I may hook up another hard drive and install windows 7 x64 and see how that affects the encoding time.

As a side note, the only thing about this board is they made so similar of boards I may have posted the wrong one. I will have to grab the exact model number but mine is a bit different and only supports the quad cores, it was an early board. But even though these boards are end of life they still have been doing bios upgrades for them... But the last one I had was for the shanghai processors.

[uberprinnyakatux]

Alrighty I had tome to reinstall windows and well that helped quite a bit windows 7 shaved quite a bit of time off with a lager movie, the smaller blu-ray was about 8 hours before the larger 50gb blu-ray takes about 6-7 hours which is more acceptable. I am looking into a 4 series of nvidia graphics card for cuda since I am looking to run WOW on a bit better box then my mac book. I seem to not be able to find the cpu's for this board so I am looking at setting up an AM3 or i7 box...

[Infiltrator]

If you want speed go with an I7 cpu, a SSD and plus a couple of the Nvidia Graphics Card. That will make a killer rig, for encoding all sorts of formats.