Terribly slow Prepare/Rebuild on new system

[downloada]

hi there,

i recently purchased a new pc mainly for gaming and video-encoding and so far everything is as fast as it should be except for the Prepare- and Rebuild-phase in dvd-rb.

i really can't figure out where the bottleneck could be. system specs are as follows:
asus p5n32-e sli (nforce 680i sli)
intel core2duo e6700 (2x 2,66ghz)
2gb ddr2-800 from mdt
seagate ST3500630AS (500gb sata)
geforce 8800gts 640mb
asus dvd-burner
windows vista ultimate 32bit

i've got the system about a week now and did 2 movies with dvd-rb (CCE 2.70, ordinary dvd9->dvd5, no special filters, PAL-material). the encoding is as fast as i'd expect (around 5x in cce, just reencoded casino royale, 2pass in 60mins), but prepare and rebuild seem to take forever (i'm doing the rebuild for casino royale right now and after about an hour it's at 6,2%, prepare took about 50mins).

on my old system (P4 2,53ghz, 512mb ddr-400, 120gb+160gb ide-hdds) rebuild was in the 15-20min range and i think prepare hardly ever took more than 25mins iirc.

i first suspected my hdd, but in every other app it's as fast as i'd expect (copying a dvd5 on the same partition takes about 3mins, also startup times are considerably faster than on my old rig).

i'm really stuck here. i can't figure out the limiting factor. is it vista? is it driver issues? i have installed drivers for everything, always the most recent version.
i hope someone here has an idea what could cause this slowdown, because as a result, the whole dvdrb-process isn't really faster than on my old machine.

thanks in advance!

cu

[~bT~]

^ i think it has something to do with having everything on one HDD. best try it with multiple HDD's and see if there is a diff.

btw, prepare takes me max 10 minutes here and rebuild similar using a P4 3.2 HT with multiple HDD's.

maybe something to do with Vista?

[Boulder]

Using the same HDD shouldn't matter that much, especially for the prepare phase since it mostly reads from the HDD.

[downloada]

thanks guys, but using multiple hdds is kinda hard, i only have this one sata-hdd and atm i don't need more space. and on my old system i only used one hdd for reencoding, too (i tried having the source on a different hdd than my work/output, but it didn't really speed up the process).

i'll try using my external usb2-hdd with dvd-rb as soon as i get the chance, maybe that way i can see if the sata-interface might have issues in my system...

on the first disc i did on this system (deja vu, german version), there were some ILVU-sections and i thought that might slow things down, but casino royale takes even longer and it doesn't seem to have anything unusual in its disc-structure.

cu

[jdobbs]

Using the external drive is probably a bad idea. An SATA drive is much, much faster than USB-2...

Not sure what it could be, but both of those two phases are disc-bound while ENCODE is processor-bound, so it is almost assuredly disc related. I usually complete a PREPARE in 6 minutes (12-13 if I'm doing REDISTRIBUTION). REBUILD usually takes 10-15 minutes (with burn-time included). This is with a standard 250GB ATA drive (with 8MB cache).

[Boulder]

Is there a way to check the UDMA status in Vista? It would be interesting to see whether UDMA is enabled and not PI/O.

[stereo]

couldn't it simply be a matter of not having decrypted these discs correctly? a lot of ppl seem to have had problems ripping those

[downloada]

hi,

i checked the dma-status of the drive in vista and it says that it's using DMA-mode.

the rebuild for casino royale took 171mins in the end and during the whole rebuild, it didn't sound like the hdd was maxed out. the drive seemed to be accessed only once in a while.

afterwards i joined 2 700mb avi-files with vdubmod, there the hdd was constantly working and the joining only took a bit more than a minute.

i still don't know what this could be. i tried running dvd-rb as admin, didn't make any difference. i also tried another movie, just started the prepare and it was just as slow (and since it was just a test, i aborted it after a few mins).

during the casino royale rebuild i took a look at the vista system monitor, the hdd-graph never got above 1MB/s and was very spikey and irregular. i don't know where else to look.

the casino royale source indeed seems to be strange, as neither nero recode nor dvd shrink would compress it (it imported just fine and can be previewed, but the main-movie is said to be "not compressible"). though it plays fine from hdd in mpc (and i don't have any on-the-fly decrypters installed).

well, i'm gonna go search for solutions a little more and if nothing helps i might try to install an ide-hdd from another pc for testing.

cu

[laserfan]

...i might try to install an ide-hdd from another pc for testing.Interesting. My money's on the "single drive" theory--if your PC has an IDE connector run-don't-walk and try this out.

[jdobbs]

Connect the IDE drive and try running on it alone... I'm sure you have a drive throughput problem. It could be anything, maybe caching, I don't know... but your system is running incredibly slow on the part of the process that depends on disc.

[superuser]

@downloada: Make sure if the caching is supported by ur drive, turn caching on.

Secondly u can try increasing the buffer size by increasing the buffer size for your IDE size. I am not sure in Vista hw u would tht, but here is general concept of it: edit system settings and increase buffer size for device on IRQ line 14 or 15 depending on whether your IDE drive is plugged onto primary or secondary channel.