Multi-burning, Keeping it Real

[Commandoe]

Realistically, can I expect to copy/burn multiple disks at the same time? And if so, realistically, how many can I expect to do at the same time? I’m in the process of building a media center (8 TB external hard drive, and a Popcorn Hour C-200) for my DVD/BD collection, and I want to do it as simple and fast as possible. I have seen one guy on the forum say that his process can take upwards of 5 hours for one disk. Well I have over four hundred titles, and I’m thinking by the time it takes for those to be completed, we will be on to the next media that replaces what we currently have! I’m able to create a computer specifically built for this process; therefore, I can install as many DVD/BD burners as I need. But again, what can I realistically expect to build that will be efficient, but productive? Is this even possible?

[GregiBoy]

The long rip times occur if you are compressing.to removable media.

For a Media Center setup such as you are talking about times are far less if you:-

1. Rip uncompressed to your HDD
2. Queue your XXX to Mobile processes.

For example on a mid-range workstation that I use for this:-

DVD Rip takes 12 mins
Generic H264 MKV Audiocopy profile processes this at approx 150 fps. I have seen some of my colleagues achieving 500fps with a new i7 Quad core.

This translates to roughly 15 mins for a 90 min title single pass or 30 mins for double pass.

My general procedure is to rip multiple titles to my HDD, full disk (ie. No compression) and then queue the multiple titles for processing using XXX to mobile.

Blu-Ray generally takes 4-5 times more.

[irishgrunt]

GregiBoy,
I would be interested in any helpful recommendations you can make in how you've achieved good frame rates when converting. I average about 50fps and would like to imporve this performance.
I have a Q9400 Quad Intel - Win 7 64bit - 8 GB Ram 7200RPM drives - EVGA GTS 250 Video. What combinations of hardware have helped out the most. I do a lot of converting of kids movies and shows for my daughter to watch on the Xbox or stream from other computers in the house.

Also on a side note, when do the Cuda/CoreAVC options come into play when using DVDFab? In what areas do these help?

[GregiBoy]

@IG

Hmmm, that seems slow.

I have two workstations that I can use for encoding and I achieve far better results than that.

On my Core Quad 2 Q9400 @ 2.66 Ghz with NVidea 8400GS I achieve ~150fps
On my Pentiom Dual E5200 @ 2.5 Hhz with NVidea 8400GS I achieve ~90fps. Before I installed the 8400, I was achieving around 70fps.

This is using variants of the H264 & XVid audiocopy profiles.

My good friend and mod colleague, Maineman, reports encoding speeds of ~500fps on his new i7 system.

I always rip to my HDD first and then encode from there and I regard this as the biggest speed improvement that I have made outside of hardware for 2 reasons.

The fps is faster and more than compensates for the time spent ripping to HDD.
I can set up queues for overnight processing. I usually set up 5-10 titles.

[irishgrunt]

Thanks for the info.
I do rip to the hard drive and que up the movie rips. In fact I read from one hard drive and write to another. I'll have to look into my hard drive performance and see if I have a motherboard driver issue or incorrect BIOS setting. I may not be getting my full SATA speeds that I should be.