CPU Usage

[Wheemer]

How much CPU usage do you think transcoding xvid will take on my server I have listed below?

I'm thinking of purchasing an mvp...

Is ffmpeg a good solution for this? How does it compare in playback quality to viewing from my pc client? Is there any negtive affect?

[nielm]

Try it and see:

<path to sage program directory>/ffmpeg -i xvid_video.avi -t 300 -f dvd -b 4000 -s 720x480 out.mpg

This will encode the first 300secs using as much CPU as possible
When Sage is encoding, it will do it in 'real' time, not as fast as possible, so Time how long it takes, and divide by 300 to get the cpu %

On my system (Athlon64 3000+), it takes 2.5mins for 5 mins of video, so 50% cpu usage.