Build a rig especially for encoding

[Remuxer]

Interested in building a rig especially for encoding BD50's to mkv's and MP4's.

What are the ideal CPU and RAM specs for this? Should i be looking at pci-e NVE SSD's for fast read/writes or is this aspect not THAT important compared to CPU/RAM specs? Is a HDD spinner setup fine? (thinking of long term longevity here for constant reading/writing as this rig will spend most of its time just ripping/writing/reading/calculating/writing etc)

In general what is the most important to consider if one is to build a rig especially for remuxing and encoding?

This is just for fun as i have discovered a new hobby here - i enjoy messing around ripping and encoding so want to get into it with a good pc setup for the purpose. I want to make mkv's to watch on the big screen telly, MP4's for my phone and tablet and whatever new devices come along. Probably will make a set of videos to watch on my laptop as well. So lots of encodes of the same disc for the various devices to do, hence wanting a purpose built machine for the job as it seems some of these encodes can take many hours at a time.

Thanks for your opinions.

[Feallan]

The CPU is most important for encoding. You don't really need a lot of RAM (even 4GB should be enough but better to go with, or a fancy GPU.

You would probably want to go with Intel, but I'm not sure which of their processors is best for encoding. Options include 5820K (older, but 6 cores) and 6700k (newer, but 4 cores).

[Remuxer]

Thanks for the input

Yeah it makes sense that the CPU is most important for this. Was not sure about RAM though. 

So the HDD sub system is not that important either? So spinners are the way to go then?

With regards the CPU - is it more about frequency (ie, 4+Ghz) or more cores? Is encoding done on one core or is it spilt across as many cores as is available?

What site/forum would be good to read up on all this?

[MrBrown]

If I need do reencode a DVD or BD Videostream, I use the free tool 'handbrake' and it uses all cores of my CPU. So we'll written programs should be able to make use of multi core systems. But that is a program dependent thing, if it uses just one core, or more.

[Feallan]

x264 scales pretty nicely, and that is what all free encoders use (afaik).

HDD speed is not that important, pretty sure and average HDD would have enough speed to not drag down your CPU even with crazy bitrates.

I'm not an expert on this subject though.

[scotlandman]

Hi

I've noticed good speed increases on my new Laptop:

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K Quad-Core 4.0GHz Skylake [8 Threads, 8MB Cache, up to 4.2GHz]

GPU: 2x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M - 8GB DDR5 Video RAM in SLI - DirectX 11

MEMORY: 32GB Kingston HyperX Impact DDR4 2400MHz (4x8GB)

M.2 SSD BOOT DRIVE: 512GB Samsung SM951 Extreme Performance PCIe M.2 Drive (2150MB/sR | 1500MB/sW)

M.2 SSD Drive 2: 512GB Samsung SM951 Extreme Performance PCIe M.2 Drive (2150MB/sR | 1500MB/sW)

HARD DRIVE: 1TB Samsung 850 Pro Solid State Drive [550MB/s Read, 520MB/s Write]

HARD DRIVE: 2TB Samsung 850 EVO SATA 3 6Gb/s Solid-State Drive

Obviously a rather expensive machine and at the top end of Laptop and could give a good PC a run for it's money but if you were to look at building your own machine you could do it far cheaper and with awesome results.

My MAC Pro has:

MAC PRO 2014
PROCESSOR 3.5GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5 v2
MEMORY 64GB 1866MHz DDR3 ECC - 8X8GB
HARD DRIVE 1TB PCIe-based Flash Storage
Graphics Card Dual AMD FirePro D700-6GB VRAM
OS - Bootcamp Windows 8.1 Pro

Also does a great job but I'm pretty positive for a fraction of the price of both you could get awesome results.

Try go for Dual XEON CPU if you can afford it as from what I have seen that will absolutely smash it :-)

Hope that gives you an idea of the higher end and scale it down from there, also depends on which program you will be using would differ on time spent to do the encoding.