Video Conversion to DVD

[aristotlewilde]

What is the most important component to speed up converting video to DVD?? It seems to take forever. My setup is below. What should I upgrade??

Cooler Master Cavalier Case
400 Watt Power Supply
Elite Group ECS NForce-939 Motherboard
AMD 3000 Winchester CPU
Asylum GeForce™ FX 5200 (256 mb) Video Card
4 x 512 MB RAM
120 gb Western Digital Hard Drive (7200)

[pentachris]

Do you mean converting avi files to Mpeg-2? Yes, it takes a while, there's no way around it. :(

The most important component is the CPU. Intel CPU's do this a little faster than AMD's. Depending on the program you're using, there are usually some quality settings that can be adjusted to speed things up - at the expense of quality, of course.

In this test setup (http://216.92.52.205/index.html?modelx=33&model1=70&model2=73&chart=24), it takes about 3:33 for an Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester on a K8T800 board to convert 5:32 of AVI to Mpeg-2.

How does your system compare?

[saphalline]

Think about all the calculations required to do something like this. Let's say you have a video resolution of 640 x 480. You're using 24-bit color. There are 30 frames per second. There are 60 seconds in a minute. Let's say an average movie length of two hours.

That's 3,317,760,000 bytes (~3.09GB) of raw data for the average movie! :eek: Now you're asking it to compress that much data into a much smaller file size with as little loss in quality as possible (which requires the use of complex algorithms) on a frame-by-frame basis. Tell me, how long would that take you!? :p The fact that modern systems can convert video faster than you can watch it is just amazing in my mind!

[pentachris]

That's 3,317,760,000 bytes (~3.09GB) of raw data for the average movie!

DV-AVI is actually something around 13.5 GB per hour!!! :eek:

[jdbaines]

You don't need a computer to cross-record home video to DVD, but you don't get chapters - all you need is a video player and a dvd recorder - use TV as monitor.
I'm using this at present to give more shelf space, and may re-do the DVD by loading and processing with Nero or similar.