BD Ripper (3D Plus) Seeking advice for graphics acceleration hardware

[bereid]

I have built a new HTPC based on a recent ASUS full ATX motherboard with Intel Core i7-2600K, Z68 chipset, 16GB DDR3, and I am running Windows 7 Professional x64. So far, I'm using only the motherboard's integrated graphics. I typically rip my DVD/BD media to .iso image files, and then transcode to h.264/MKV format. I find even with this relatively high-powered CPU and generous RAM, and enabling the Intel Quick Sync feature, it is still taking far too long to transcode my videos (typically more than 3 hours for a single BD title).

I expect that additional hardware could improve that time significantly, but I'm not confident that I am equipped to select the best component(s) for the job.

My motherboard has multiple unpopulated PCIe 3.0 slots. I would be grateful for any advice whether I should buy one or more graphics cards, and if so, is there a trend toward the NVidia or ATI brands, and which models might offer the best performance/cost ratio? If I'm mainly interested in speeding my transcoding, and not necessarily concerned about graphics display or gaming, are there other options besides graphics cards that might yield comparable or even greater transcoding performance?

Along with the hardware recommendations, it would be very helpful to have some expectation of how much improvement I should reasonably expect to achieve.

FYI, my system has a 600W PSU, and plenty of space for additional hardware, and plenty of cooling.

Thanks in advance for any advice,
Bruce Reid

[trife]

im on an i7 laptop using quick sync and a 2 pass encode takes 50 or so. And I have tons of issues with the software. a one pass encode can take like 20 minutes or so. but im one of the unlucky people that gets jerky video as a result unless its set to two pass which disables IQS apparently.

Hardware shouldn't be the problem. You either got some crazy settings, bad drivers, or are ripping from dvd drive without copying the files to hard drive first?

sorry if i misunderstood something.

[jbinkley60]

I have built a new HTPC based on a recent ASUS full ATX motherboard with Intel Core i7-2600K, Z68 chipset, 16GB DDR3, and I am running Windows 7 Professional x64. So far, I'm using only the motherboard's integrated graphics. I typically rip my DVD/BD media to .iso image files, and then transcode to h.264/MKV format. I find even with this relatively high-powered CPU and generous RAM, and enabling the Intel Quick Sync feature, it is still taking far too long to transcode my videos (typically more than 3 hours for a single BD title).

I expect that additional hardware could improve that time significantly, but I'm not confident that I am equipped to select the best component(s) for the job.

My motherboard has multiple unpopulated PCIe 3.0 slots. I would be grateful for any advice whether I should buy one or more graphics cards, and if so, is there a trend toward the NVidia or ATI brands, and which models might offer the best performance/cost ratio? If I'm mainly interested in speeding my transcoding, and not necessarily concerned about graphics display or gaming, are there other options besides graphics cards that might yield comparable or even greater transcoding performance?

Along with the hardware recommendations, it would be very helpful to have some expectation of how much improvement I should reasonably expect to achieve.

FYI, my system has a 600W PSU, and plenty of space for additional hardware, and plenty of cooling.

Thanks in advance for any advice,
Bruce Reid

I have an AMD Phenom II 1090T system that I upgraded to a PNY NVidia 560Ti card. I went from around 20-25fps to as high as 70+ fps when ripping Blu-Ray discs using the AC3 High quality profile. Most Blu-Rays now rip in 30-40 minutes.

[bereid]

Config options causing my trouble? But I haven't changed much.

Thanks very much for the tip. Other than the default configuration options (per the install process), the only options I have changed when using Blu-Ray Ripper to process my .ISO file as input (yes, it is stored on a local SATA drive) and produce MKV output (on a different local drive) are to enable Intel Quick Sync, choose the h.264.audiocopy profile, select the Remove HD Audio checkbox, and use the Video Effects dialog to disable cropping (in order to preserve the original resolution and aspect ratio). This last bit of disabling cropping is a recent change to my process, since I noticed that without doing so, the resulting .MKV file always has reduced vertical resolution; for example, when my source file is 1920x1080, the .MKV file produced always has the same horizontal resolution (1920), but ALWAYS has the vertical resolution reduced to some variable value (depending on the source video) in the range 8xx to 9xx. I have been able to see the difference between .MKV files produced with the default (automatic cropping) and with my tweak to disable cropping, and the result of preserving the original resolution is superior. As an aside, I have been in touch with DVDFab support, and after several rounds of email, I have received disparate and otherwise inconsistent advice about how to configure the tool to ALWAYS preserve the original resolution and aspect ratio, or even whether it can or cannot be done - that inability to get cogent and consistent advice from those [presumably] most equipped to understand and explain the software is quite disappointing.

In any case, regardless whether I let cropping happen automatically as is the tool's preferred mode, or manually disable it to obtain the results I want, the difference in time to perform the transcoding operation is negligible to me, but consistently much, much longer than it seems like it should be.

So, I suppose my next step is to zip up the various log files produced from my most recent operations, and send them to DVDFab tech support (in whom I have little confidence for reasons mentioned above), and hope that they can help me discover why the thing is taking sooooooo long? Or, look for an alternate tool to do the same job...

Thanks again for the reply, and thanks in advance for any feedback to these new comments.