Question for you Q6600 owners out there.

[bosshoss]

For those of you who are Q6600 owners AND movie encoders, I was hoping someone might give me an idea of some of your encoding times. I recently upgraded from an A64 3200 to a E6300 OC'd to 2.8. The difference was friggin' amazing to say the least for my encode times. On my old M2500+ a full length (estimated 90 minute movie time) was around 6 hours, A64 3200+ was around 3-4 hours, and now my new C2D is around 32-49 minutes. I am just astounded at the decrease in encode times.

I was just curious to see what ya'lls times were, havin those two extra cores. I'm trying to get an idea whether pickin up a Q6600 was worth it right now. Lets use a 90 minute movie running at 29.9 FPS. Could anyone give me an estimated total encode time for a movie such as this?

Thanks guys.

EDIT: (If it matters, I use pretty much default settings. Encode set to quality, Standard motion search, but audio is switched to Dolby Digital.)

 

[joefriday]

You never said what program you use.

Anymore, I use WMM to edit my .wmv files captured at 1400kb/s. For a thirty minute sitcom, it takes my stock D 805 6 minutes to edit out the 10 minutes worth of commercials. The WMM/.wmv combo is the best I've come up with for high compression, fast editable video w/o sync issues. I just wish I could encode higher than 1400kb/s, but that's the highest selectable setting, and I haven't found a hack to enable higher settings yet. A quad core at 2.4 Ghz would bring my encoding times to 2 minutes.

 

[bosshoss]

Doh! Personally I use TMPG mainly for taking MPEG/AVI to MPEG 4 DVD. It's optimized for multi core CPU's in one of the menus, but it says nothing about more than 2 threads, so I was curious as to whether it did indeed use all four cores and by average how much of a difference this made in encoding times over my two cores.

 

[joefriday]

Good question. From this link here:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1027848

It appears Q6600 will help out in TMPG. Here's a benchmark using tmpg. Not mpeg-4 conversion though:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/642-5/intel-core-2-extreme-qx6700-quad-core.html

In the past I've found tmpg is be one of the slowest encoders around, and have since stopped using it. I prefer Nero's Recode myself, but then you're stuck in Nero Digital format. That's why I switched completely to .wmv, as it offers compression and quality similar to mpeg4, and with WMM I have a very fast encoder that is optimized for Netburst CPUs.

 

[bosshoss]

Hey thx for the info. On a side note though, I assume with your switch to .wmv format, you are using a HTPC for video playback? 90% of the time I do the same, but for the kids' TV I have to burn discs for use in their standalone player. When we purchase new movies for the kids I usually like to decrypt a copy for my HTPC and burn them a copy so I don't have to break out the paddle when the discs get damaged. And this might sound a little noobish, but you're using Windows Movie Maker to encode your .wmv's?