DV AVI files are what you get when you capture FireWire/1394
digital video from a Mini-DV camcorder into a computer.

MPEG2 is the format you need when you want to record DVDs.

On an Athlon XP 1800+ with PC2100 memory and fast hard drives
(which btw are NOT the bottleneck), it takes approximatelly
4 to 6 hours to convert 1 hour of video from DV to MPEG2.

Please research the performance and cost of the following 
hardware when used for the same task:

1. The Matrox RTX.100 card, which sells for $1000 :-(.

2. A dual-processor Athlon MP based system, fastest clock available.

3. A dual-processor Xeon based system, fastest clock available.

4. An Athlon 64 3400+ system. Dual-processor also if it exists.

5. A Pentium 4 Hyperthreading system, fastest clock available.

6. One of the ADSTech Pyro DV or Pinnacle boards, if appropriate
(I don't get the impression that any of the low-end DVE hardware
has accelaration features).

7. Any creative solutions that you might have. e.g. renting time
on a supercomputer, or a low-cost Linux Cluster or something :-)

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Request for Question Clarification by supermacman-ga on 24 Jan 2004 10:03 PST

You can consider a Power Mac G5 dual 2 GHz system with DVD Studio Pro.
With the G5 processor's AltiVec instruction set and DVD Studio Pro
being optimized for it, you can do the conversion fairly quickly.

LINKS:
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
http://www.apple.com/dvdstudiopro/
http://www.apple.com/dvdstudiopro/compressor.html

PERFORMANCE:
According to http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance/, the Power Mac
G5 encoded a DV file and turned it into MPEG-2 more than twice as fast
as a dual 3.2 GHz Xeon. DVD Studio Pro with Compressor (Compressor is
a free download) was used.

PRICE:
The Power Mac costs USD$2999.
DVD Studio Pro costs USD$499.

---

Clarification of Question by atr-ga on 29 Jan 2004 05:47 PST

That's good. It sounds like the dual-G5 could do about 45 FPS
(1.5x real-time).

But what about the dedicated cards like Matrox, Pinnacle, and ADSTech's ?
Can $1000 worth of specialized hardware beat what's effectively a $3500 
general supercomputer?

Please note I've also posted a narrower version of this question:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=300822

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Request for Question Clarification by supermacman-ga on 29 Jan 2004 14:32 PST

My post above was more of a comment, but I posted it as a
Clarification to get your attention.

My instinct says that hardware cards are faster. But I don't know;
dual G5's are pretty fast, too!

I don't have experience in this field (other than with Macs
specifically) so other researchers should answer this question! ;-)

- supermacman-ga

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Clarification of Question by atr-ga on 01 Feb 2004 07:51 PST

ssparks827 and byrdhouse,
I looked into the Canopus DV Storm...  apparently it is not as
good a deal as the Matrox RTX.100:

http://www.matrox.com/video/products/pdf/rtx100xtreme_vs_dvstorm2ultra.pdf

What do you think? Is the comparison biased?

supermacman thanks for letting me know about the dual-G5, I had not
realized the high-end macs were such powerful machines! Too bad they're
a bit out of my budget.

---

Clarification of Question by atr-ga on 06 Feb 2004 16:35 PST

closing this now.
see http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=298701

We you refer to fast hard drives what exactly do you mean?  Are you
using SCSI 320 10K or 15K drives?  SATA -150 drives are great for
video editing.  To answer the question, try using a hardware encoder,
software encoding is time consuming and isn't or doesn't compress as
well.  canopus.com,,,dvstorm2 with the hardware encoder for mpeg.  The
system you are using sounds good, but you need to be able to write at
speeds of up to 50 -100MB sec to get real time encoding.  Eg..1hour of
video encoded to mpeg should only take 1 hour to encode that is
realtime encoding.
Scott

You really should look into the Canpous DV Storm series. I use this
for my video production company and when encoding mpegs it is fast
hardware!