Re: hardware acceleration or mobo/cpu/ram tradeoffs?

James Howison wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I use ffmpeg on Knoppmyth to convert from MPEG2 created by a  Hauppauge 
> PVR-500 to mpeg4 divx with (using a myth2ipod script  from  here:  
> http://www.myth2ipod.com/ that I've tweaked just a little.
>
> It uses these options:
>
> -y -cropleft 10 -cropright 10 -croptop 8 -cropbottom 8 -deinterlace - 
> vcodec xvid -s 320x240 -r 29.97 -b 384 -qmin 2 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 - 
> acodec aac -ab 96 -g 300
>
> Currently this works great but is pretty slow, because I'm running a  
> Celeron 700Mhz with about 128 MB of slow ram. (yes, I know)
>
> My questions are:
>
> a) are there any PCI or GPU boards that ffmpeg can use to do hardware  
> accelerated conversions like MPEG2 to MPEG4 (divx or H.264)?  (I've  
> looked up the new Nvidia boards but I'm confused as to their  
> capabilities in this regard and on linux in general, and XvMC seems  to 
> be only for playback, right?)
>
> b) if the answer is no, or yes but they are really expensive, then  I'll 
> be buying a new MoBo/CPU combo, so is there any set-up (type of  MoBo or 
> type of CPU) that works best for such a task?  Should I focus  on memory 
> speed/bus speed?  

MHz for MHz the celeron is slower (on ffmpeg at least) because of its 
small cache. You want a CPU with *at least* 1MB of cache.

> Anywhere I can learn about the trade off  between RAM 
> and CPU speed?
>
> Thanks,
> James


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