Slow video conversion on MBP vs. Older Windows Machine

[rotobadger]

Hi All...

My new (2010) 17 inch MBP (i5, 4GB RAM) is converting video from avi to MP4 much more slowly than my older Windows XP machine (Centrino Duo 2Ghz, 2GB RAM).

I am using Red Kawa PSP 9. On my MBP it takes about 14 minutes to convert from AVI to MP4. Identical video on my old XP laptop takes about 8 minutes.

Any reason why this should be happening? I just don't get it. My MBP should be lightyears ahead in speed than my old HP laptop.

Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

 

[spinnerlys]

Have you looked at Activity Monitor and sorted by CPU use to see if that software of yours uses all the resources it can get?

Have you tried Handbrake or MPEG Streamclip yet?


Wow, that Red Kawa PSP 9 looks like a POS software, it runs on Java anyways. And it's slow.
I only have a two core CPU right now, and it uses 150% (out of 200%) of that, but I suspect it can't hyperthread, thus not take advantage of the four-thread ix CPUs.

 

[rotobadger]

Have you looked at Activity Monitor and sorted by CPU use to see if that software of yours uses all the resources it can get?

Have you tried Handbrake or MPEG Streamclip yet?

Thanks for the fast reply. Not really a fan of Handbrake and I've always had great success with Red Kawa PSP 9 converter. However, I'm not complaining about the time it takes for PSP 9 rather the difference in time between the two laptops.

As far as the CPU goes, I haven't done that yet. I'll see if it's using everything it can...

 

[rotobadger]

Ok, ran activity monitor while converting video and its showing ffmpeg (the converter) running the CPU at about 99.2 percent.

Under "Threads" it shows "1".

Real Mem shows 15.4 MB.

Does this sound right? It seems my MBP should convert much faster.

 

[spinnerlys]

Ok, ran activity monitor while converting video and its showing ffmpeg (the converter) running the CPU at about 99.2 percent.

Under "Threads" it shows "1".

Real Mem shows 15.4 MB.

Does this sound right? It seems my MBP should convert much faster.

It used 150% (out of 200%) on my Mac (C2D 2.0GHz), so maybe try another CPU intensive software and see if it can use more than 99%. Handbrake is able to do that.

As that software is without doubt written for Windows, just look at it for ten seconds, it might not be optimized at all for Mac OS X, and to have some kind of OS independence, it is written for Java, just like Azureus was for a while.

 

[psingh01]

In my experience java performance on OS X isn't all that great. It could just be that combined with how the coded it.

 

[rotobadger]

Ok, you guys are absolutely right! I downloaded Handbrake and converted the same file. My MBP blasted through it in just under 3 minutes! My CPU showed about 190 percent use.

So, you are right about PSP 9 not being optimized for OS X.

Thanks for you your help guys!