[Wylug-discuss] Linux-specific buying advice - system purely for video editing/encoding/rendering

[Dave Fisher]

I have many terrabytes of low visual quality but unnecessarily high
bitrate videos. I want/need to to re-encode them to something a *lot*
more sensible and I'll need new kit to do it. Some will need editing.

Once the VP8/WebM encoders have matured (and there's hardware support
for encoding and playing)  I'll probably use it, but in the meantime
hardware-assisted H.264 is going to be a must-have for non-web video
(that'll be Theora).

I know very little about the hardware requirements for this kind of
thing, nor much about the ability of the Linux kernel and video apps
to exploit it, so I thought I'd better ask.

I am guessing that I need:

1. The fastest CPU I can afford
2. The fastest memory I can afford
3. As much bandwidth as possible between CPU, memory, sub-processors and disks
4. Fast graphics - maybe not up to the standard of the most demanding
games, but enough to make visual editing less painful

Some questions about this use case:

1. How much, if any, benefit can gained by adding cores or individual CPUs?
2. Does any particular processor have a distinct 'bang for bucks' advantage?
3. Do you know of any systems or motherboards that are known to be
particularly good?
4. Do you know of any affordable high performance H.264 encoder boards/devices?
5. Do you know of Linux software encoders which are particularly good
or particularly bad at exploiting modern hardware (e.g. multicores)?

I am not averse to building systems or software from source where
there is a *significant* performance/capability/affordability gain,
but I'd much prefer one or more auto-magical black boxes that'll
really do the job.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Dave