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Handbrake slow

L

LastLine

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 24, 2005
1,313
21
I've recently started using handbrake to encode my videos, however it seems incredibly slow. I'm running on a 2.1Ghz G5 iSight iMac with 1.5gb RAM. CAn anyone suggest why it's so slow or is this just normal performance? I've never really done much encoding before so I'm slightly ignorant to this.

Thanks
 

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I don't know if this affects the encoding time, but you're trying to compress a 2 hour movie down to 150 MB? Ouch, that cannot end up looking very pretty.
 
By the way, your full name is in that screenshot. You can expect a knock on your door from the mpaa any minute now. ;)
 
motulist said:
By the way, your full name is in that screenshot. You can expect a knock on your door from the mpaa any minute now. ;)
Click to expand...
Fixed ;)

Oh and take another look - it's 20 minutes not 2 hours
 
LastLine said:
it's 20 minutes not 2 hours
Click to expand...

Well I guess when you've been up all night and and dead tired those Z's start to look an awful lot like 2's. If it says 20 minutes of footage will take 6 hours to encode then I doubt it's a setting thing. My guess is it's a reporting error. Try letting it run for a half hour and see if it completes.
 
Hand brake blows speed wise. It takes my iBook (1.33 ghz) forever and a day to rip one of my movies. itunes can seriously rip and encode like a 1000 CDs before hand brake can get even one movie done...Pretty lame I say. Either Hand brakes code is horribly optimized or ripping DVDs is extremely tasking on a computer (I could understand this. When you rip a movie you have to compress two kinds of file formats, a video format and a sound format). Still it really wouldn't surprise me if a better solution came out in the upcoming years that did this task much faster.
 
LastLine, that doesn't look right to me at all, but I don't know what is the matter with it. No way should it take that long to do 20 mins of video (even set to H.264, which is more processor-intensive) on a 2.1Ghz iMac, I have a Dual 2.5 Ghz Powermac G5 that would get through that in less than 15 minutes. An iMac G5 would be slower, but not 25 times slower!

And sk1985, you indicate you know this, but video encoding is MUCH more processor intensive than ripping a CD into iTunes as an MP3... not only is it dealing with two forms of data in terms of Audio and Video, it's also (in most cases) decoding the CSS system that locks up DVDs, and dealing with much more data generally, which means it'll take longer to compress. Handbrake is pretty fast compared to most other solutions I've tried for that kind of thing.
 
First, don't encode to H264. Its painfully slow and the quality isn't all that much more spectacular than standard MPEG4.

Try just encoding to MPEG4 using an AVI container with the Xvid encoder. The quality is great and its far faster than H264. Also make sure that you have nothing else running in the background taking up your idle CPU.
 
Handbrake slow!

I know using H.264 would slow down compression time but does the choice of using Track Mix slow it down too? Say choosing Mono as oppose to Stereo or worst Dolby Pro logic II.

I just want to use it on my ipod so choosing Pro logic II or even Stereo may be an over kill. I just wanted it to compressed faster. Any suggestion what's the best setting to speed up????
 
MPEG4 vs H264

I finally had time to run a few tests. Using MPEG4 instead of H264 ran a 2 hour and 35 minute movie in 51 minutes on a 2ghz MacBook w/4gig of RAM. Running the same file on using H264 on the same machine took 3 hours and 35 minutes. Both of the movies were originally 720 x 480 and the resulting movie was 640 x 480 with borders. I was using these files on an iPod touch and sure don't see a difference on this particular movie with the exception of the MPEG4 movie lossing a little color fidelity. This was a stand-up comedy movie but my guess is that with a traditional movie there could be a color fidelity loss. The file is also considerably larger in MPEG4 format. 1.96 gig vs 1.3 gig.
 
I have to say, for once linux is faster than OSX. Right now I am running an encode for a 3 hour movie on dvdrip, ETA 1hr 50min. What is even more ironic is that it is running on a 3.15GHz PENTIUM 4!!! Quality is pretty much equal to H.264, xvid codec, avi container, 6ch audio, 16:9, 720x480. WOW
 
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