Handbrake

I was encoding a 700mb AVI movie for my iPhone using Handbrake. It took around 20minutes with an i5-430m. Does that sound about right? I remember reading Laptopmag's reviews stating that a 140mb movie file or something took ~1min to encode so I was figuring this process would take 5minutes or so. Is the 20minutes it's taking me right? Is there software out there that would do it quicker? Thanks.

 

You can't make a blank time statement:

1) Your CPU - and multicore/multithreading support in the software are important
2) Not sure if this exists, but maybe GPU acceleration


3) Based on the codec - the actual video content - I was letting my laptop reencode Video files from a 5D MK II - the frames with lot's of black and little change in the sky (night) were quicker than the ones with less black (Wroclawka Fontanna on Youtube)

 

Depends on your settings and what presets and filters etc etc you use.

For best encodes you would use x264. But if you are using handbrake makes me think you have a Mac? Not sure if that matters or not, never encoded on a Mac and likely never will either.

But for example, if you use --preset fast for x264 it could take 10 minutes. If you use --veryslow or --placebo --crf14, it could take about 2.5 hours and encoding only 4-5 frames per second.

If it was a BluRay level @ 1080p, you could be looking at 2-3 Frames per second and about a 5-6 hour time. This btw is using all 12 threads, on i7 it's 2.5 threads per core for x264 and @ 100% the entire time.

So it just depends.

BTW stay away from CUDA or AVIVO encoding, the only people who use that it seems are Nvidia or AMD employees who are idiots or just misinformed people who believe the Nvidia/AMD idiots.

 

What settings are you outputting to?

20 mins doesnt sound bad.

 

I'm not using a Mac. I'm using an HP DM4.
As far as settings are concerned, it's for an iPhone, so it's for 480 height, doesn't mention the width. And it will be an MP4 file. Oh and x264..

My question basically was, considering I'm taking your typical 700mb AVI and encoding for an iPhone and it's taking 20minutes with an i5-430m, is that a "good" time? Or is there a program out there that could better utilize my system to get the time down.

Thanks fellas.

 

Try comparing the times with Super

The only program ive seen which allows you to set the amount of cores is WinX DVD Ripper

 

Alright, thanks!

 

20 minutes sounds about right. I actually use VidCoder because the UI is nicer (still uses the Handbrake encoder). For a benchmark, it takes 8-12 hours to transcode a 1080p Blu-Ray to a higher compression 1080p file for me (40GB -> ~10GB) on my i5-540M. So yes, at that resolution and cpu that sounds about right. You won't get much better pure CPU H.264 encoding... you may get speedups using a GPU to encode videos, but I've never had any luck with any of those programs (ATI's avivo encoder mostly)