Actually, given that virtualdub/xvid uses both cores on my Opteron 165, I think that moores law will still apply. It might be that the number of cores doubles every 18 months from now on, but that's still going to speed up encoding.
About hard drive sizes - I think we're actually starting at a better point than when dvd was released. In 1998, a 20 gig hard drive was big (and expensive), which was only 2 or 3 full dvds. Today 300gb is pretty common, which is 10 full HD-DVDs, and it sounds like terabyte drives won't be too far away.
![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}