Fastest Mac for encoding movies to DVD?

[Mac Hammer Fan]

What is the fastest MacPro for converting movies to DVD using Toast Titanium?
3,33 Ghz 6-core Westmere 2,4 Ghz 8-core Westmere or 8-core 2,66 Nehalem?
And is there a significant difference with a Quad Pro 2,66 Nehalem?

 

[Transporteur]

The fastest one would be a 2.93GHz 12-core with 2 Superdrives.

From your list, the 2.66GHz octad will be the fastest one. Put in two Superdrives and you're good to rip two DVD's at a time.
The difference to a Quad 2.66GHz is pretty much 100% if you're using a multithreaded app like Handbrake.

 

[Mac Hammer Fan]

I didn't mean for ripping DVDs, but the inverse operation: making a toast DVD image from a movie. And I will use the second DVD bay for 2 SSDs in the future.

 

[meptik]

Just tried throwing some stuff at Toast Titanium 10.

While it seems to spread its activity nicely across (virtual) cores, it comes nowhere near maxing out my 3.33Ghz 6-core. With SD material, total load averaged 500%. With HD sources, it actually dropped to less than 200%. Rather puzzling. By comparison, Handbrake consistently maxes things out.

Not sure what might cause this. Perhaps whatever Toast is using for mpeg2 encoding doesn't scale that well.

In any case, if you're going to be using Toast to do the conversion, throwing more hardware at it might be a bit of a waste.

 

[matteusclement]

@meptik
maybe your hard drives are bottle necking your HD material.

 

[meptik]

@meptik
maybe your hard drives are bottle necking your HD material.

Also thought of that, but why would they not be a bottle neck when encoding through Handbrake? Besides, we're talking about encoding from HD to SD. Even using mpeg2, the output shouldn't be that huge. Read speeds should also be more than sufficient, I would think.

Edit: just checked, don't see any noticeable spikes in read/write activity while Toast's doing its thing

 

[reel2reel]

Depends what software you're using and what quality you need. More cores are better for Compressor. I find Compressor terribly slow for encoding, though, so using virtual clusters probably just brings it to a somewhat acceptable speed (2-3 hours instead of 8 hours for a 1 hour show).

Toast is much faster at encoding, but I find Compressor's quality can be much better than Toast's "best" setting.