Encoding is something most of us do on a fairly regular basis and it is a good way to monitor system performance.
One of our favourite tools is the excellent, free Handbrake. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
We extracted a VOB file from the DVD of AVATAR and then converted it to MP4 at quality settings.
Our AMD reference system took 12 minutes and 24 seconds to encode the VOB file. The overclocked, watercooled Cryo system managed it in almost half the time at around 6 minutes and 32 seconds.
TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress is easy to use, yet has a deep set of options for advanced encoding techniques. It is also full of editing features to enhance or alter your video clips before converting. We used the latest 4.7.6.304 for our testing today. We converted an AVATAR MPEG2 to MPEG4 and recorded the time taken.
Again, we see similar results with TMPGenc 4.0 with a massive improvement on encoding times with the overclocked 980x Cryo system. As we have ascertained by this point, the 980x is the best processor on the market for video editing application.