Need light-weight Debian based distro with best resource utilisation
 

Hello everyone!
I'm an intermediate Linux user. I need a distro which is light weight, but extremely good with resource utilization.
At this moment I'm running ffmpeg for video encoding on Windows, on my laptop ( AMD A8 6410 @2GHz, 8GB RAM). While it runs it always shows 100% cpu is being used. I want to use it in a Linux platform with an OS which is very optimized for how it uses the resources present. Power consumption is not an issue since laptop is always on charge and is rarely moved ).
Say Arch ( which I've hard has a very good ram usage ), lubuntu ( lightest debian based along with Ubuntu ) , puppy ( not so sure about it being good for heavy usage ), etc. Any suggestions please.
I don't know of I could explain myself well enough, but I will be very thankful if you people help me out and if anything is unclear, do ask.

Thank you.

P.S. - please tell about tags which I can give for this post.

Video processing is never going to be a light-weight operation, but I'd have thought that your CPU should be up to it. Any Linux will probably make fewer demands on the CPU, and 8GB is ample (unless those videos are full-length, HD films!)

If you want a Debian-based distro, then I'd look at
> AntiX (MX version rather than the original AntiX): light but not too bare.
> Ubuntu Studio, if you are particularly interested in videos and/or music. That has been made light-weight so as to maximise the resources available for jobs like video editing.

I said Debian based since I know it's package installers, nothing else. The processing that I would basically do is compression of episodes mainly around 23 to 40 minutes, but sources will be mainly 720p/1080p. What I want is an OS which will need less resources to itself but can allocate as much as any program demands, say ffmpeg. So that the program runs in it's fastest possible way given the resources. Yes, a CLI based system would be perfect but I am not that good at using it truth be told. And can you like say anything about Arch, can it really utilize the RAM on the best way possible as it's homepage claims ??

Thanks for your reply.

With or Without systemd?

http://linuxbbq.org/

and

http://antix.mepis.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

I guess you figure it out.

Sorry but I have never used systemd before, all I know is that internally it helps services and programs being processed right. What will be your say about using or not using systemd.

netinst http://www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/p...es/bones.shtml ;)
then e.g: (from searching but not to imply all lightweight wm:) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/window_manager

netist,,, Sid by the way is "much more... muchier..."

What do you want me to know from these bro ?? How to efficiently use a search engine and what is a window manager ???

Please be a little descriptive.

Thank you

i don't know that archlinux "claims" anything.
anyhow, what you want is a CLI installation, because an X server with window manager and whatnot WILL eat a SIGNIFICANT part of your resources, which could be used for transcoding otherwise.
once you have arrived at that wisdom, it doesn't matter so much which distro you use. why not debian (it's usually called a netinstall, because you install only the base system from the cd and have the option to install a gui via internet).
if that still isn't lightweight enough, you can try to strip the system down even more. say, all you want it to do is transcoding, then 90% of what even a CLI install contains is not needed. but, compared to gui or not, the impact of these changes is rather small.

PS:
don't let jamison20000e's replies confuse you. you will learn to just scroll over them soon enough.

Sorry, vague is my middle name...
 

netinstSomething's better than nothing unless you're a baybie then you die!

jamison20000e vague []#your surname here
Please enlighten us with what you meant with those links and "much......."

@ondoho
Yes definitely a bare bone CLI would be the best but I do have check the output files with vlc, send them over the network to other OSes viz. Android and Windows, check integrity, internal errors in frames etc, this I'll need a proper GUI, and also with nemo/dolphin with samba, thus base CLI isn't an option.

Since you're familiar with Debian, I'd say just do a netinstall of Debian, install a lightweight GUI with the tools you need.

but do you have to do that on the same machine that is doing the transcoding?
fwiw, i have all my media files on my homeserver, and no gui installed - i ssh in from my desktop and watch the files directly.

in any case, if you reallyreallyreally need that gui, i guess a netinstall plus
apt-get install openbox
is a safe, simple and lightweight alternative.

What will you recommend for the base , Arch(I like doing it's setup, so a bit inclined there), Debian(only proper recommendation here yet) , anything else ???