I have an old box w/ a Pentium 4 2.4GHz (hyper threading) CPU. I realize the hyper-threading doesn't constitute multiple cores but that is another discussion. I am going to try using this box as a dedicated Playon server. It has 2 gigs of ram and plenty of HD space. The only thing on the box will be stripped down XP and Playon. The box will have a wired gigabit connection to the LAN.

I realize this hardware may not be sufficient. (any comments/predictions on that are welcome)

But my question is, with the "Full" encoding option turned on, am I able to simply pause playback at the beginning of a video while the CPU continues to encode the file? Will this allow me to use the slower CPU if I "pre-encode" the video stream?

Thanks!