I have been doing some reading and I need some advice about hardware that will be suitable for video encoding. Such as processor type and speed and so on. Any advice or personal experiences would be great.

Short answer: The Latest and Greatest.

The typical packages will do a great job on the latest Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition processor, for example.

If you're willing to tweak a little bit, you can download source and toy around with compiling for a specific processor, or perhaps find a pre-compiled version optimized for said processor.

However, you can't buy a processor that was top of the line two years ago, get an optimized compile, and expect to have similar performance from today's latest and greatest.

If you find a suitable processor, make sure that you find a good motherboard and memory to go with it of course. Depending on what software you use, make sure you're adjusting any settings to further optimize in real-time.

If you give us an example of what kind of Video Editing you plan on doing (Digital Video, MPEG transcoding) - you may get further information.

If you just want to encode video to mpeg, for example to capture TV as in a DVR setting, you can get away with less processor/memory if you get a hardware encoder. For example if you get one of the Hauppage PVR series (150, 250, 350, etc), they come with a built-in TV to MPEG decoder that you can dump directly to your hard drive from. There's decent linux drivers for that series of cards. A lot of this is discussed in the MythTV pages if you're interested, with hardware recommendations etc.

So would a dual core processor make a difference or not?

barn63

It depends on what software you intend to use. If it was written for multi-thread then yes (newer versions of avidemux2), if it is not written for multi-thread then no (most other software). More and more software is being rewritten to handle multi-thread. If you post exactly what you intend on doing someone will probably be able to give you more software choices and a better idea what hardware you will need.

The one thing that you will need is lots of memory (1gb minium) and lots of hard drive space (320 gb minimum). Since you will be running lots of data across your drives you will probably want to look at a raid0 setup for your videos. Raid0 has no data redundancy ( I would only use it for non-critical data storage) but is roughly twice as fast as a standalone drive.

The more data you post the more we can help..

Lazlow

I would like to do like a multimedia machine. Store DVDs and tv shows and such.

barn63

Ok, store + play DVds no big processor requirements. Storage is another issue. Small dvd isos are 4.4 gig each. Newer DVDs are 9 gig each. The new blue ray disks are 25gig each(I think). 320gig(300 after format)/9gig is about 33 dvds. Figure out how many dvds you want to store.

If you are just recording tv shows you will not need anything outstanding for cpu. I would stick with a good Hauppauge card for non digital cards. I suggest this brand not because I think that they are the best but because they are the ones with the most support. The best software for pvr work is probably mythtv. Same reason as with the card. As I said in the previous post fast hard drives (probably raid0) are a must for high quality live recording.

If you want to create standalone playable dvds from your recordings, you will want as much cpu as you can afford. The standard ntsc size is 720x480 x29fps. After recording you will need to change from whatever you recorded in(640x320 was fairly popular a couple of years ago) to the dvd standard. Avidemux2 is probably the best at this type of conversion (newer versions are multithreaded). After you get it into the proper video format you will need to construct the DVD. Here there are lots of choices. I prefer qdvdauthor. Then you need a dvdburner(hardware) and burning software. The best burning software is K3b. Despite the fact that K3b is for Kde you can also use it under gnome (with kdelibs).

Hope this helps

Lazlow

Ps You might want to have a look at the book Linux Toys or maybe Linux Toys 2 (old age and memory do not mix). In one of them they have a step by step to making a multimedia box.

Thanks for the replies. So top of the line processor isn't needed but hard drive space is....I was wanting to go big on hard drive space....probably around 1 tb if possible(raid obviously). Any other considerations with hardware?

Are you going to be sending these out to a big display? (Plasma, LCD, CRT)?

You may want to make sure you'll be able to get the video card you choose to support such an output if that's the case.

barn63

When you look at raid cards be very careful. Most of the cheap raid cards are software raid cards (similar to winmodems). They are designed to intergrate into windows and thus are usually a real PITA for linux. I loved promise controllers in windows but they are a real PITA on linux. Check to be sure, but I think most people are using 3ware.

Video cards is another time to look at the linux reviews for the specific graphics card you are looking at. Nvidia cards tend to have better supported drivers but this may change since AMD bought ATI. If you have a TV with digital inputs (HD), I would definitely try to get a card with that type of output. If not digital, then SVHS is probably the next best choice.

Good Luck

Lazlow

The minimum computer hardware for video production is as follows.

1 GHz CPU
512 MB RAM
10 GB storage capacity
PCI video card
VGA Video card
16-bit Sound Card

Optional devices:
CD or DVD recorder
SVHS or VHS VCR
DV player


A video production computer depends on the application. Is it for making movies to be shown at a movie theater or is it for editing family/friend events.

Threading should not be used for video production because it decreases quality.

The best video editing software is Cinelerra CVS. A multi-processor system is recommended to use Cinelerra but you can get by using a 2 GHz uni-processor system.

If you are going to use IDE or SATA hard drives, I suggest placing at least four in a RAID-0 array. This will provide at least 60 MB per second in the worst conditions. People may argue, but most IDE and SATA have horrible sustain writes/reads.

For the highest video capure quality, I suggest Canopus ADVC110. If you do not have an IEEE-1394 (aka Firewire, i.Link), try getting a PCI or PCI Express video capture card based on Philips SAA713x chip.

A video card that contains DVI connection is all you need to support many displays.

Would Myth TV be worth using?

Mythtv is probaly the most used pvr software on linux. The more a software package is used the more information there is on setting it up and trouble shooting.

Lazlow