Which Transcoding Tools Produce The Best Picture Quality.

Donald

True, I've been reviewing the specs of both for some time now and I just can't make my mind up. What's odd is that the opterons actually cost more than the xeons and in a world where Intel is considered to be overpriced it doesn't make sense. I may just stay with a single P4 Northwood and overclock to its 3.6 gig max. It's to bad that CCE doesn't benefit from HT but I guess one can have it all.

 

HT is more of a hardwired software change so you don't get anyore processing power. It just uses what is there more effeciently if the software is written for it. CCE uses HT but with no additional real processors it yields no benifit.

Optetrons are pitted more against the Itaniums since They are the only true 64 bit processor Intel has. Thus the price difference.

I never was happy with the P4 based processors. They traded to much performance for the Mhz it gains. You notice their fastest and most expensive procs are nowhere near 3.0 ghz.
I concede that the fastest Itaniums are faster than the optetrons but the price difference negates the Itanium's advantage on the high end.

P4s main advantage is in the SSE2 implemetation.
If you have SSE2 program the P4 can perform substantially better. CCE is SSE2 enabled making this quite Important.

 

I was just checking ebay, and saw a matched set of 1.5 GHz Xeons going for around $103 total. It seemed like a good deal, but my P4 2.66 didn't cost much more than that. What kind of performance do you think I could have gotten out of these?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=51055&item=6705855732&rd=1

 

not again.

 

Doc

The older low speed Xeons were terrible performers. Your 2.6 will encode faster.
Don't go less than 2.4 ghz. Otherwise the Amd MPs are the more powerful combo on the cheaper side.
The Newest Xeons are quite fast if you can afford them and will encode CCE faster than any setup I can think of. With the best SSE2 and fastest procs you wouldn't need a farm.

 

6402...

How do you go about finding if a program is SSE2 enabled?

 

Usually its advertized. With CCE that was the main loss when using CCE sp 2.50. It was not SSE2 enabled like the later versions.

 

Dual chips are the reality that hyper threading can't ever meet. The xeons can also be overclocked but individually or one on one clock per clock a P4 blows a xeon away, especially a P4 with the Northwood core. The frontside bus is only 400 mhz so you'd take a hit there too. For my money overclock what you have.
_X_X_X_X_X_[small]

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)[/small]

 

The newer Xeons and chipsets come very close to the newer P4 chipsets. For encoding you would definately get double your performance.
But by that point you have spent a pretty penny.
If your on a budget overclocking can get you substantially lower encode times as the memory speed increase helps as much as the proc speed.

 

Thanks for the insight. A few months ago I picked up 3 P4's 2.66 533FSB for $300. I put 2 of them with some cheapo Matsonic boards that don't overclock. I'm thinking the best buck I could spend now would be on some better mobos. Any thoughts?

Also, my son just put together a P4-2.2 on a 400 FSB Intel board with std SDRAM, and he seems to outperform my boards that have DDR, and he hasn't overclocked yet. I'm thinking motherboards play a much larger role in performance than they are given credit for.



_X_X_X_X_X_[small].
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I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. (Pablo Picasso)[/small]

 

Sdram was a dog but the Intel boards would feel pretty snappy.
I usually wait for the Asus boards on newegg to come out in the refurb section for about 30-40 bucks. They are fast and overclockable. I have an extra awaiting the next custumer and proc.

 

You could also look for a performance flash for your Matsonic. Sometimes if a cheap board gets popular someone will make an adjustable bios.

 

That's a thought. I'll look around. I talked to a Matsonic USA rep, and he said they wanted to lock in the cpu speed. I got the boards because they fit into a space-saving book-style case that I could easily stack. They have given me too many problems, though, and I'm at the point that I don't care how much space a few towers take up.

 

I began backing up movies into mpeg 4 back in tht 90s using Flask mpeg and later Gordian knot. I achieved some pretty good results by splitting movies into two 750 meg files and then overburning them to to a CDR. I could have encoded a movie into a single 750 meg file but the result would ahve been reduced picture quality. Because there were no mpeg4 compliant players at the time, I had to use a PC connected to my TV in order to play them (resolution if I remember was 480X480). I quit making mpeg4 after the arrival of DVD burners.

 

Hmmm ... the good ole' days. Sophocles ... You must have had a mobo that had an RCA video output? Before DVD burners it was always fun to see where you could land between VHS quality and the source DVD. I got my best results with DivX...but action scenes always pixelated. It was the arrival of DVDXCopy that prompted me to get a DVD burner. And when DVD2One came out, I didn't know how things could ever get better than that.

...and this thread lives on.

 

Actually the TV out was on my Nvdia AGP Video card which I believe I got at the end of 1997 or early 1998. In the beginning I left my copies on my slave hard disk but it soon became choked with movies. Although I'm a registered user of DiVx I rarely use it anymore. I originally got into with the misguided notion that I would fill hard disks with movies that I'd watch as my wife and I sailed around the world on a 32 foot sail boat we inherited.

 

What was misguided...that you could put a lot of movies on a hard drive ... or sailing around the world in a 32 foot sailboat?

 

Sailing around the world, the boat was able but I'm not wealthy enoughto retire or to make that happen.

 

Well, at this point, if you were to win the lotto, you could do the Scuba Pete thing and put all your DVD's on a 6-pack of blu-rays. And then set sail.

I once had the asperation of getting rich, retiring, and sailing the world. That changed when I got married and had kids.