Canopus ProCoder
Canopus ProCoder is a 'professional' level media encoding system, able to output all kinds of video formats from a wide range of input sources. Conversions can be batched, it can demux video and audio, and it can output multiple differing formats from a single source, all multi-threaded.I use a variety of source inputs to ProCoder's conversion engine, creating AVI and streaming WMV9 video outputs from a high-bitrate MPEG2 source clip, before outputting PAL DVD from that created AVI source. Three encodes in total, audio included.
AVI output from MPEG2 source
The Xeon system is nearly 17% slower when converting to AVI from high-bitrate MPEG2 source using ProCoder. Multi-threaded and supporting HyperThreading, Intel themselves use Mainconcept's encoder to show off Pentium 4 and Xeon performance. I'm guessing they don't use an MPEG2 to AVI conversion.
Streaming Windows Media Video 9 output from MPEG2 source
There's nothing to split either system here, indicating either truly matched performance, or a disk I/O bottleneck. Analysing what happens with disk I/O while the encoder is being run shows that it's not I/O limited, so the CPUs are equally at home here.
PAL DVD from AVI source
This time the Opteron system is slower by nearly 9%. Again, a nice demonstration using ProCoder that depending on the conversion being done, and therefore the encoding engine being used, fast Opteron or Xeon may be the better tool for the job.