RB Farm

[nimbles]

have any of guys tried this out?


RB Farm, an assistant program to DVD Rebuilder. RB Farm allows multiple PCs to work together on a network to perform a faster CCE encode than could be performed with a single PC.
Wish i had decent second computer to try this on- might try it with my dodgy compaq laptop- if i can find 8 more similarly specced machines maybe i can get a 5-pass encode with RB, down to dvd-shrink times!! :laugh:

may be helpful to some of you guys who do have more than one decent computer on a network at home (or IT guys who can run it at the office after hours ;))

[celtic_druid]

It isn't just using the TCPDeliver AVISynth plugin is it? Must say that I never got around to testing it, TCPDeliver that is.

[nimbles]

I'm not sure about that as i just found it while browsing the dvd-rb forum at doom9- will try and give it a go if I have time tonight- but my laptop is prone to randomly restarting so i'm guessing that will mess up the encoding.

[celtic_druid]

Hmmm, doesn't look like it uses TCPDeliver, just encodes each chunk of the DVD simultaneously on multiple PC's... Now if you did use TCPDeliver you could make use of 2x the number of chunks on the DVD PC's. Although you could probably have one PC doing multiple decodes and dedicated PC's for encoding.

[nimbles]

yeah the slower machine doing the decoding and the fatser one doing the encoding right?

my understanding was that it allocates the m2v and avs files across the two or more pcs's (not sure how it does it- may take longer if it is just split 2 or more ways equally if one computer is significantly slower than the others- e.g. my home ntwork, amd xp2200+ desktop, dodgy compaq 2200+ laptop, and a pII 333mhz running with 64mb ram :eek: )


*edit* its done sequentially, so basically each pc is assigned a segment, then if one finished before the other, it will skip the next segment (as its been assigned to the other machine) and starts the next segment, simple but effective, and better than just divvying up equally.

[celtic_druid]

Yep, shouldn't take too much CPU power to serve up such a simple AVISynth script fast enough to keep up with CCE. Much more of a strain on the network though as you are actually serving RAW frames which I guess could easily make a network the bottleneck if you were getting like 3x realtime in CCE.

[nimbles]

I get 1.2-1.4 on one machine (xp2200+ with 512mb Pc2700 ram- and running CCE in normal priority) at the moment so any improvement would be greatly appreciated :(