Hardware encoding queries

General Support / Questions Hardware Encoding
1

Hi,

I’m hoping someone can help me with hardware encoding.
My current system comprises of the following components:
Gigabyte ga-ep35-ds3 rev 2.1
2 Gig ram (soon to be 4) 4X1gb OCZ reaper pc2 6400
Intel Q9300 core 2 quad
ATI radeon hd4350 graphics card
Windows 7 Pro and MCE buddy 2.4.8

I’ve recently upgraded to the premium version in the hope of speeding up my conversions, but alas I realise it is down to hardware.
I am having trouble identifying which (if any ) of my components are compatible with hardware encoding

Can anyone offer any advice ?
If its just the graphics card, can anyone recommend one.
This is just a headless server also running next PVR with a single Hauppauge HVR 5525. no other uses.

2

The setup you have is on the older side - my suspicion is that none of the components enable HW encoding. I’d start by swapping out the video card - I’ve had good luck with the Nvidia GTX 1060. Depending on if this machine is 32bit or 64bit, you may run into issues (NVidia just dropped support for 32 bit machines).

If you’re going to be doing a lot of encoding, you might consider running MCEBuddy on a different machine and have it watch the recording share of the PVR server.

1 Like
3

I agree with Will, the hardware that acts as your foundation is preety old and underpowered for your new needs (hardware transcode).
I’ve Ben having great luck with my Rx460 AMD video card for hardware video transcode.
I pass my ATSC/NTSC recordings through MCEbuddy 2x. First to rename and remove commercials - then the completed MPEG2 MKV exported into a temp folder.
I then use A’s Video Converter to convert those exports to H264 videos. It takes roughly 12 min for a 720p 42m show ans 23 min for a 1080i show to complete. NTSC SD shows transcode in about 8 minutes. this is using the HQ setting in A’s instead of Balanced or Quick.
After that, MCEBuddy takes that file, adds back the Metadata, cover image etc and adds it to my collection.
A’s works with Nvidia, Intel and AMD and it free (although a donation is requested).
Videos look and sound great and take a FRACTION of the time with MCEBuddy alone.
Although, I understand that MCEBuddy with Nvidia and Intel is much faster than on AMD systems.
Vety little CPU is associated with progressive to progressive conversions, but there is a slight bump with Interlaced making three videos a little more CPU dependant.

1 Like
4

See points 1 and 8 on this topic

I wonder if anyone with a dual system (NVidia + Intel) has done any competitive benchmarking between NVidia (NvEnc) v/s Intel (QuickSync)?

5

Thanks for all the input.
I was beginning to think that my “faithful hardware” is now nothing more than old hardware.

I’ll look into an upgrade soon and see how it goes.
Thanks again for your input.