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Handbrake Question

sonictonic

sonictonic

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 25, 2006
954
11
San Jose, California
When converting a DVD using the preset iPod settings, should I not use my computer as it's working?

I ask because I've got a brand new MBP 2.2GHz Core2Duo, 2GB of RAM, and yet its been encoding this 90 minute movie for the last 2 hours and says it still has 3 hours to go. I have heard people say it should not take nearly this long, so maybe I am being ignorant in thinking I can have other apps running and keep using the computer as this is going on? Should Handbrake be the only thing running when I want to do this? I'm not running anything major... iTunes and Firefox mainly. Why can't my awesome new Santa Rosa MacBook Pro do this faster?

Any tips are appreciated. Thanks :)
 
Handbrake usually works best by itself.

OS X loves multi-tasking but that means the CPU is not dedicating itself to Handbrake only, but it is "Spreading the wealth", I guess you can say, and in the end, it slows down your encode.

Encoding a DVD for iPod usually takes a while to do.

If you really want it to go fast, Quit out of all your other open applications and leave it alone to do its thing.
 
Are you using h.264 encoding for your movie and are you doing a two pass of the video? These two are the only things i can think of that could explain why the processing of your dvd is taking so long. Usually when just set to plain mpeg4, i can rip a dvd in about 40 to 45 minutes. When i put it on h.264 it easily goes over into several hour range, as the FPS drop from 70-80 to 20-25.
 
It takes me about 30-35 minutes to encode each movie. I am also encoding for ipod. I routinely surf and play little games and listen to music while Handbrake is running. No problems here. Not sure why yours would take that long.
 
Just a thought. Didn't Apple change the screen resolution of the iPod?

If you encode at 640 x 480 it'll take 4 times as long as at 320 x 240.
 
why would it take four times a long for 4 times the screen area...you're shrinking it so it shouldn't make that much of a difference either way

and i encode movies from VOB to mp4 at full resolution in the aforementioned 40 minutes
 
cal6n said:
Just a thought. Didn't Apple change the screen resolution of the iPod?
Click to expand...

Not unless you're talking about the iphone.

If you encode at 640 x 480 it'll take 4 times as long as at 320 x 240.
Click to expand...

Not exactly. The time consuming part of compression is performing the statistical analysis, which gets harder in proportion to the level of detail in the scene. So 4x resolution can provide more detail, but if the scene doesn't have much detail to begin with then you won't see a 4x increase in render time.
 
I noticed something today with Handbrake. I ripped a couple of my kids DVDs that were in danger of being scratched to unusability. For one, I ripped the main feature and a couple of the bonus shorts, using the queue feature. This run took up to 180% (i.e. close to maxing two cores, depending on what else I was doing) with 0% idle.

For the second one, that I'm doing right now, I'm ripping only the main feature, not using the queue, and Handbrake is using only 75% (ie. only one core) with 60% CPU idle.

So on a sample of two, it looks like using the queue will speed things up. However, I'm not willing to quit the current rip (60% done) to experiment and I won't be doing any more rips soon. Anyone else notice such differences in behavior?

Edit: I did a quick check this morning with the same DVD I was doing last night. Using the queue does force Handbrake to use both cores.
 
My brand nw 2.2 GHz SR MBP:
Converting to H.264, only using 20% (of 200%) of the CPU. Over a full core's worth not being used. 100% quality, native size (not anamorphic or deinterlaced)
Trying queuing... (Cancelled 10% done, no big deal)
No difference, at least not for a single item in the queue.
This is annoying. It should be running close to 10 times faster than this. iStat reports 60% of the CPU time is idle, so this should mean Handbrake should be able to use ~150% of a CPU, not just 20%.
I wish this wasn't the case. Over 5 hours to do a movie is crazy on something as powerful as this. It should only take an hour or less.

(btw, I'm converting off the hard drive, having used MacTheRipper)
Anyone got any idea?
 
applehero said:
This thread may be of some help as we were going through this a while back.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/316775/
Click to expand...

This thread does not address the problem. The problem is that handbrake is only using a tiny fraction of the available CPU to convert to h.264
Handbrake is presently running, using about a tenth of the available CPU resources, and I still have 60% idle processor (iStat reports this). Handbrake should be using all of the available CPU clocks, but it is not, not by a long way.

Does anybody know why this is the case, and how I can get Handbrake to use all of the available power?
 
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