Handbrake conversion times

Mindprey said:

I have a late 2012 Mac Mini 2.3 (or 2.6, I can't remember) i5. When I do a conversion in handbrake from a large .mkv file (20-30GBs) to ATV3, it will literally take 3-5 hours per movie. I'm only averaging around 9-10 fps per movie. Other than a new processor/motherboard, what can I do to speed this up? Sometimes I will have 7-9 movies in the queue for handbrake and it will run for a couple of days before it is finished.

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I have a 2.6Ghz 2012. Your times are about right. You need to remember the fps on a bluray rip is slow because of the size of the frames being transcoded. You run an old 600mb avi and it transcodes in a few minutes.

You can't do anything to speed that up. The CPU will be running at 100% capacity in a HandBrake transcode, particularly a bluray rip. 100% is 100%. Although if the OS is throttling the CPU because it is running hot then cooling the mini down could give you back some of the CPU that is being throttled. In otherwords, if the CPU is running at 90% because the mini is at its temp limit, then by cooling the mini down the CPU is able to run at 100%. That is only an issue if it is being throttled. iStat Menus is a good app to see if this is the case. Although having said that I think it is unlikely. My mini transcodes in Handbrake at 100% and sits on about 98-99C. It's limit is 105C so it is pushing at full CPU capacity. I just can't ring anything more out if it!

You can try and limit CPU usage with other apps but that is likely to have minimal in effect if it is running standard background applications.

RAM will have minimal effect (8 or 16), although if you have 4GB you might want to get more.

quad core cpu is needed for more speed

philipma1957 said:

quad core cpu is needed for more speed

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You're right. I assumed he had a quad because the post refers to a 2012 2.3 or 2.6Ghz (which is a quad) but then it refers to an i5 (suggesting it is a 2.5 dual).

Either way the quad is definitely needed.

I made a few comments on a real life comparison between the i5 dual (sandy) and i7 quad (ivy 2.6ghz). Clearly there is a difference, but it is very noticeable in CPU intensive tasks like Handbrake.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1623759/

I was just setting some work for Handbrake and took an interesting screen shot. I often run files across two minis to save time. This screen shot says it all.

There are two applications of Handbrake running in the image. The top one is from my main mini while the bottom one is running in screen share from a slower/older mini. The two video files being coded are different but are from the same batch of mkv files from seasons of MASH (essentially the same files).

Episode 5X02 'Margaret's Engagement' is being done on a 2012 i7 2.6GHz Quad Core (Macmini6,2) and is transcoding at roughly 134fps.

Episode 9x01 'The best of enemies' is being done on a 2011 i5 2.5GHz Dual Core (Macmini5,2) and is transcoding at roughly 54fps.

Handbrake is taking up about 343MB of my 16 GB of RAM on the 2.6 so RAM as a factor is negligible.

Both CPU's are running at 100% with minimal background apps running.

handbreak speed

I typically get 16 mins for a two hour DVD movie with at least 2 audio soundtracks included.