Can I play music while encoding?

Newbie Forum
#1

Hey

Here is my machine

Amd Athlon 800mhz
320mb ram
20gb HDD
Liteon DVDRW 16X

I need to backup a lot of dvd’s. They take about an hour to an hour and a half each. I use DVD Shrink. I compress them to 60% as thats the highest I can have to put it onto a 4.7GB DVD+R. (Which brings me to another question-If you compress a dvd with dvd shrink to 60%, is the quality still DVDR?)

Anyway, When I’m encoding I can’t listen to music, It stops playing and kind of stutters. Do you know what I mean? I can browse the internet and talk on MSN and stuff.

I want to be able to decrease the amount of time and/or be able to listen to music while I encode my DVD’s. What do I have to buy/do to achieve this? Thanks.

By the way, I have a very limited budget. I’m thinking another HDD just for DVD’s and 512mb ram. Should be able to get both for around £80-90. Thanks in advance

#2

Ok, two answers.

First, your method of backing up DVD’s is producing garbage quality. You either need to learn to trim down what’s on the disc (either using the advanced features of Shrink, or else using VOBBlanker or something) or a different method of re-encoding (such as DVD Rebuilder).

Second, more hard drive space will NOT solve your problems, nor will more RAM. Your CPU is just completely inadequate. I don’t know what sort of motherboard you have, whether it can handle a bigger CPU or not. If it can, a bigger CPU needs to be added to your list, as well as the more RAM and the second hard drive.

#3

You can’t listen to music and encode because of the processes are really memory and processor intensive procedures. You could maybe throw another processor in your cpu, but i’d consider buying another cpu and a kvm switch to control both cpus with one keyboard and mouse. Nowadays cpus are incredibly cheap, for example at one major retailer this week they had a cpu package with monitor (AMD 3000+ Sempron, 17" CRT) for only $299. If you sell the monitor, which is worth $170, just imagine; a 3000+ sempron for less than $200. This is the time to buy too because of the back to school specials. This is what i did because i wanted to be able to convert files to dvd and still play a game, etc.

#4

To “cure” the stuttering just lower the applications priority to low and you should be able to play mp3 in exchange for slower encoding/transcoding speed.
//Danne