Building the MONSTER CCE encoder.

I would like to share my knowledge. A friend of mine gave me his pc for 2 weeks, so I had some time testing it with cce 2.64 and 2.50 with pal dvd video only (means m2v prior demuxed). The system was an asus A7m-266D, with 2 mp1800s, 512ddr, 29160 adaptec scsi 64bit pci, and all hardware aree scsi's , mainly 80 and 160 harddisks.I uses dvd2avi to make a project file, used with the simpliest script, with mpeg2dec.Using windows XP The problem I found out is that my home pc is hanging like when encoding, but this problem was not found in case of this big machine. I switched to task manager and only 60% of cpu time was used, so I started another cce encoding parallel to this one. Cpu usage growed to 100% and the total encoding RT spec was 2.2. That's it.

VOB to DVD2AVI (FILM or not) d2v to CCE2.66 via AVIsynth2.06 (no filters/resizing) Making DVD-Rs at 720x480 @ 3000-5000 Speed: 2.8x realtime Pent4 2.4GHz overclocked to 2.61GHz 512Mb PC1066 RAMBUS RAM (overclocked to 1160) 2 Maxtor ATA133 7200rpm 40Gb HDs as RAID0 Gigabyte 8IHXP mobo WinXP Pro SP1 I noticed a hige speed increase when I switched to RAMBUS from DDR. My old Dual Athlon1600 with DDR2100 only did 1.8x and my (short lived) dual Athlon2200 only did 2.1x with the same RAM. Processor power is of course important, but dont forget about system bandwidth. Although CCE can use 2 procs, AVIsynth can only use 1. The biggest advantage I found with the dual Athlon was the ability to multitask while encoding and not notice it. But that of course means that you are NOT using all your CPU cycles.... (my usage was only about 62%)

OK, I'm continuing to work on my research for the Monster CCE Encoder. I've just about eliminated AMD CPU's from my list. I'm reading too much stuff about them that I'm going to stick with Intel. I know there are a lot of AMD folks out there, but I'm willing to spend the bucks on Intel. Now, Here's the latest iteration. For $1,500 bucks Yes I know it's an insane amount for computer stuff, but I havent' upgraded in a LONG time. I can build either of two machines. 3.06ghz P4 with 1gb of RDRAM or Dual 2.6ghz Zeon P4 with 1 gb of RDRAM. I've read a few articles about hypterthreading that tell me that I will probably disable it for encoding. Seems that several tests show it encoding slower with its turned on. My understanding of the dual is that CCE has limited dual capability, especially with AVISYNTH frameserving, BUT I will probably be able to run 2 encodes and get great speed from both? I'm really leaning towards the Dual setup. I like the idea of having 2 cpu's. But, remember, what I'm really looking for is the fastest encodes. Comments? Roveer

According to the latest review of Hyper threading in P4 3.04 at Anandtech Hyperthreading is particularly strong in media encoding. Checkout the review at Though they have used MPEG4 and MP3 encoding in the article, I would think that MPEG2 encoding with CEE should also get a boost.

not sure how the HT will go with CCE, but XEON's have HT anyway ;) can you say '4 virtual processors on 2 physical processors?' Enf...