Generally speaking, any computation you can do in ram exclusively will help immenseley. I have mounted whole ISO's and used OSeX for various transcoding operations and it does help. For streaming or doing screen capture sessions, ram disks help a lot as well. Generally if you are coming from the dvd to the HDD, the dvd will be so slow that going from a previously captured iso copied to ram, then transcoded to ram disk would be much faster. You will have to get the initial iso from the slower dvd, but once it is saved you can transcode much faster if it is coming from HDD or ram into the cpu. I would go from HDD to another HDD, or HDD to ram , or RAM to RAM to be the fastest. I am not sure though that the HDD would be the bottleneck in this case since processing speeds may not be fast enough to starve from the data flow of an HDD? that would be a good test to perform!