Carl Karsten wrote:
On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 9:51 AM, I put the Who? in Mishehu
<mishehu.mash...@gmail.com> wrote:
Senectus . wrote:
I'm rigging up a box just for ripping our entire DVD collection (300+
DVD's) to a digital format so my DLNA capable box can play anything without
worrying about the 2yr old destroying discs etc.
I'd like to know what the low hanging fruit is in terms of quick hardware
for trans-coding...
Any advice out there? I'll be using Ubuntu.
Would 64 bit be better than 32bit?
64bit would definitely be preferred over 32bit, if for nothing more than the
memory addressing (and you're likely to be working with large files when it
comes to transcoding).
I doubt that matters.
I would be very surprised to see that it reads the file more than
once, either in chunks or start to finish. My guess is it will have a
queue that's maybe a few 100 meg, and move the file though that.
Whether or not this is the case is irrelevent - I've never heard anybody
successfully use "well you just don't need 64 bits" as a compelling
argument to justify *not* getting x86_64 hardware and installing an
x86_64 OS. The underlying issue is that your system is more usable in
64 bit mode than in 32 bit mode, and the OS can access more memory - and
without the performance hit of PAE.
The only real downside that I've encountered with x86_64 linux distros
in the several years that I've been running Slamd64/Slackware64 is a
purely software issue - gcc needs -fPIC when compiling library code.
My recommendation is that however much memory you
would get in 32bit, double it for 64bit.
My recommendation is get a good price on a few gig, and maybe leave
slots open for expansion. I have trouble justifying a gig on an
average single user system. (average user does not run 4 VMs and
such)
It's a guideline. If he would get 2GB of RAM in 32bit, I'd recommend
4GB in 64 bit mode. If he gets 8GB in 32, he really probably does not
need 16 GB in 64.
This reminds me of swap formulas. They made sense when ram and disk
was expensive, but now it's hardly worth the effort - it doesn't take
much thought or cost to allocate a big hunk of disk, even if you
never need it given you have huge amounts or ram.
Again, it was always only ever a guideline. The old adage still applies
- YMMV. I have a lousy 2GB swap on my system, and I've got 6GB of RAM,
and the swap rarely gets touched unless I open up like 100 tabs in
Firefox...
I don't really see a significant difference between current day Intel Core
2/Xeon and Athlon64 procs in my usage scenario. But I've up to now mostly
been doing mpeg2 to xvid conversions. What I wish was supported (but I
don't think the prospects are very good) is for ATI Avivo support since I
have ATI cards... when I did tests in windows, it transcoded in 1/6 the
time as it took for Pinnacle Studio to transcode the same type of file...
no special filters or effects.
Nvidia's cuda(?) is also looking promising, but I am not aware of any
code for transcoding.
I *think* ffmpeg might be able to support this to some extent. I only
have one piece of nvidia vidcard hardware here, and I really don't think
it's recent enough to support those functions.
-Mishehu
