BD rebuilder for dummies thread

[datman]

I was thinking we need a thread like this. I have issues and questions that are way to basic to ask in the bugs thread. As I use BDRB I have little discovery moments. I thought I could share them here.

I guess this is how beta software works. Every encode seems different. Most the encodes I have done the 1st phase has been pretty fast 30min to an hour. Many of my encodes are strait from my HDD archive. I do this mostly because the files are already set up. It would be additional steps to rerip the original, perhaps most important more miles on my $450 burner. So if it’s not more problematic I prefer this way. My result have been mixed I have had many successful encodes some bugs and many errors on my part, it’s hard to tell the difference at first.

My motives at this time are not to burn discs but to make my archives smaller. All older movies I save to a BD-9 size and when jdobbs gets it tweaked newer blockbuster with great video and audio, save movie only to BD-25 size with HD audio intact. The extras I never watch or I can watch them off the original.

The film I’m doing now is The Last Emperor. I checked it 2 hours and it was only 70% done in the 1st phase. I was watching it and man was it slow 4 hours into it I was 85% still 1st phase. I figured something was wrong and stopped it defragged the drives and restarted to computer and the encode it was moving much faster then at 50% it slowed way down again. I checked task manager and tsmuxer was running and I wondered if that was slowing it down. This was off a new rip, most my other files I remuxed months ago. Or maybe it’s just this film. As of late encodes have been super fast (for me) So this one kinda sucks. I’m still at 88%. I’m not whining I just hope I’m not the only moron here and others will share their experiences.

I hope we can come up with a list of suggested steps, (do’s and don’ts) like restarting , defragging after every encode. Is it better to work out of your Cdrive? I think mine is faster now that I run and save in the Cdrive.

I had problems when I had the avchd checked my ISOs were not playable in pdvd-8

I see 18.9 is out I may stop this again it’s at 89.80 another hour and a half to go. Just to see if 18.9 is better

I don’t know I must be in a weird mood today so pardon me.

[Furiousflea]

I disagree personally. It's about as easy as it is going to get. I think this front end jdobbs is working on is about as easy as it should get.

It's pretty obvious you should have as much space free as possible\degragged drives\use seperate drives for source\work directory etc. If those are the steps people are slipping up on, well. Prolly best they wait a year or two for a "DVD Shrink" style solution to materialize, if it ever does.

The problems people seem to be having aren't user generated problems but a combination of incompatible players, BD-Rebuilder being in a beta phase.

Not meaning to shout you down here lol :)

[Furiousflea]

I was thinking we need a thread like this. I have issues and questions that are way to basic to ask in the bugs thread. As I use BDRB I have little discovery moments. I thought I could share them here.

I guess this is how beta software works. Every encode seems different. Most the encodes I have done the 1st phase has been pretty fast 30min to an hour. Many of my encodes are strait from my HDD archive. I do this mostly because the files are already set up. It would be additional steps to rerip the original, perhaps most important more miles on my $450 burner. So if it’s not more problematic I prefer this way. My result have been mixed I have had many successful encodes some bugs and many errors on my part, it’s hard to tell the difference at first.

My motives at this time are not to burn discs but to make my archives smaller. All older movies I save to a BD-9 size and when jdobbs gets it tweaked newer blockbuster with great video and audio, save movie only to BD-25 size with HD audio intact. The extras I never watch or I can watch them off the original.

The film I’m doing now is The Last Emperor. I checked it 2 hours and it was only 70% done in the 1st phase. I was watching it and man was it slow 4 hours into it I was 85% still 1st phase. I figured something was wrong and stopped it defragged the drives and restarted to computer and the encode it was moving much faster then at 50% it slowed way down again. I checked task manager and tsmuxer was running and I wondered if that was slowing it down. This was off a new rip, most my other files I remuxed months ago. Or maybe it’s just this film. As of late encodes have been super fast (for me) So this one kinda sucks. I’m still at 88%. I’m not whining I just hope I’m not the only moron here and others will share their experiences.

I hope we can come up with a list of suggested steps, (do’s and don’ts) like restarting , defragging after every encode. Is it better to work out of your Cdrive? I think mine is faster now that I run and save in the Cdrive.

I had problems when I had the avchd checked my ISOs were not playable in pdvd-8

I see 18.9 is out I may stop this again it’s at 89.80 another hour and a half to go. Just to see if 18.9 is better

I don’t know I must be in a weird mood today so pardon me.

1. C is a letter normally representing the drive you have your operating system on. It is relative, it isn't always the same for everybody. In future don't call it "the cdrive", it doesn't mean anything.

2. Bluray uses a much higher resolution and more advanced codecs than DVD. So encoding your Bluray backups will take a LOT longer, by a lot. Just so you have a rough feel for what I mean. We're taliing about 10x-20x longer, or more.

3. Bluray's generally have more content on them than a DVD so will take even longer again (more room for bonus material)

4. Encoding is "2 pass", the 1st pass analyzes the video while the 2nd pass encodes it. The 2nd pass takes roughly 3x longer. This is why it looked like your video encoding slowed to a crawl - nothing was wrong though.

5. Defragging is a good practice but it's not really going to affect the speed of your encode, the speed of your drive is not the bottleneck. It's the speed of your cpu that is holding it up. I haven't defragged my drives for months, if I was doing something different like playing a game where caching to the disk was taking place it would be more relevent. A highly defragged drive will only speed up things with BD-Rebuilder when the final encoded assets are muxed to an m2ts (about 1% of the total time)

6. You are incorrectly using the term "muxing". Muxing is the process of placing elementary streams in a container.

AC3+VC1+SUP->m2ts container....for example.

It is encoding that I think you are meaning.

[datman]

Thanks for shouting

1. C is a letter normally representing the drive you have your operating system on. It is relative, it isn't always the same for everybody. In future don't call it "the cdrive", it doesn't mean anything.

Yes I do know this much I knew that anyone would know that was the drive the OS was on. Prior I had both the source and the working folder in the same USB drive but when I moved BD rebuilder working folder into the cdrive everything seemed faster or a updated version speed things up.


2. Bluray uses a much higher resolution and more advanced codecs than DVD. So encoding your Bluray backups will take a LOT longer, by a lot. Just so you have a rough feel for what I mean. We're taliing about 10x-20x longer, or more.

Yes I have had a HTPC with a BD drive for about a year I just rebuilt it I now have a Phenom 940 and it has done full encodes in 6 hours. My current encode has been running for 7 hours and it's in the 1st phase. I'm wondering why,is this somewhat normal?


3. Bluray's generally have more content on them than a DVD so will take even longer again (more room for bonus material)

4. Encoding is "2 pass", the 1st pass analyzes the video while the 2nd pass encodes it. The 2nd pass takes roughly 3x longer. This is why it looked like your video encoding slowed to a crawl - nothing was wrong though.

5. Defragging is a good practice but it's not really going to affect the speed of your encode, the speed of your drive is not the bottleneck. It's the speed of your cpu that is holding it up. I haven't defragged my drives for months, if I was doing something different like playing a game where caching to the disk was taking place it would be more relevent. A highly defragged drive will only speed up things with BD-Rebuilder when the final encoded assets are muxed to an m2ts (about 1% of the total time)

Yes but not knowing what else to do I defragged:rolleyes:


6. You are incorrectly using the term "muxing". Muxing is the process of placing elementary streams in a container.

AC3+VC1+SUP->m2ts container....for example.

It is encoding that I think you are meaning.

I stand corrected on all my backups I run tsmuxer or tsremux to only keep the movie and hd audio. I always thought it was called muxing

[setarip_old]

@datman

Hi!

It's been my personal experience that it's always beneficial to reboot after the computer has been working on a lengthy conversion project and before starting another such project.

Regardless of anything that's been written about modern computers (or anything indicated in Task Manager), it seems that after such a process, the system is not "clean", with odd bits either floating around in RAM or in the paging file.

A (warm or cold) reboot appears to act as if you flushed a toilet - all the detritus immediately "goes down the drain" ;>}

[datman]

Aint that a kick in the teeth:eek:

[captain_video]

I second the motion to reboot after doing any lengthy processing. I've tried BDRebuilder and like what I've seen so far. I've been a big fan of DVDRebuilder for quite a while and I have faith that JDobbs will have another winner with BDRB. I'm just waiting for him to include the HD audio options as part of the process so I can convert my BDs to BD-25 files and make backups with my new LG BD burner.

[datman]

I figured out what must have been my problem 2 weeks ago a graphics driver error and it scambled one of my drives. I ran ckdsk and patch it back together. Some of my work is of that drive like Last emperor. I did get it to a file that would play and there were clips from Patton in it:confused: how'd that happen? So I'm starting over this time I'm ripping to a protected image.

[Furiousflea]

Thanks for shouting



Yes I do know this much I knew that anyone would know that was the drive the OS was on. Prior I had both the source and the working folder in the same USB drive but when I moved BD rebuilder working folder into the cdrive everything seemed faster or a updated version speed things up.



Yes I have had a HTPC with a BD drive for about a year I just rebuilt it I now have a Phenom 940 and it has done full encodes in 6 hours. My current encode has been running for 7 hours and it's in the 1st phase. I'm wondering why,is this somewhat normal?



Yes but not knowing what else to do I defragged:rolleyes:



I stand corrected on all my backups I run tsmuxer or tsremux to only keep the movie and hd audio. I always thought it was called muxing

Christ, next time I won't answer the questions that you asked. That wasn't an "I'm right , you're wrong" post. I answered your questions concisely thought that was what you wanted as you appeared confused in your OP...Cheek!

[laserfan]

I just hope I’m not the only moron here and others will share their experiences.Ha, ha! No, there are plenty more of us! :D

I don't think you've laid-out your hard drive(s) for us, but one suggestion I have is to have at least two, and preferably three, hard drives. I have 3: the C: drive contains the OS and Windows paging file, the D: drive is for most "working files" and temp folders, and the E: drive is for the "save to" material i.e. program output (tho I don't think BD-RB lets you output to a different drive yet).

You might be suffering from fragmentation as you build temp files, thus slowing down the process. At least, get a 2nd hard drive and use IT for your BD-RB working folder vs. the C: drive. If you are reading your originals not from a BD-ROM drive but instead from a hard drive, it would be preferable that that drive be a 3rd drive, or at least put the isos then on your C: drive (if you have a D) such that you are not Reading and Writing to the same drive during processing. Hope that made/makes sense to you... :)

[archaeo]

Definitely not a good idea to use the same drive your OS is on to either read or write your encoding work to. Besides the bottleneck from having your read and write to the same drive, it'll be the fastest way to wear out a drive before it's time. You really need to spread the work between different drives.

I also have multiple (4) hard drives, one dedicated exclusively to the OS, and the other three for working and storage. I defrag frequently - because it's amazing how quickly disk space gets fragged when adding and deleting new/old work files. I want my drives to last, and having fragged drives when running numerous intensive encodes puts an extra workload on them.

[GaPony]

Definitely not a good idea to use the same drive your OS is on to either read or write your encoding work to. Besides the bottleneck from having your read and write to the same drive, it'll be the fastest way to wear out a drive before it's time. You really need to spread the work between different drives.

I also have multiple (4) hard drives, one dedicated exclusively to the OS, and the other three for working and storage. I defrag frequently - because it's amazing how quickly disk space gets fragged when adding and deleting new/old work files. I want my drives to last, and having fragged drives when running numerous intensive encodes puts an extra workload on them.

While your main theme about multiple drives has merit, the part about wearing out a drive before its time has no basis in fact. While having a work drive or even two might be good idea, it isn't a requirement by any stretch of the imagination. The bottleneck for this type of work isn't in the read/write cycles, its the CPU cycles. A good protocol for routine maintenence (defragging, registry management, and hard drive cleanup, and backup) will provide all the protection required for people with a single drive. It doesn't make sense to have people think they need more that they do, just to convert a few Blu-Ray movies. Drives are rated by MTBF (mean time between failures), in other words hours of use, not the number of read/write operations.

[Furiousflea]

While your main theme about multiple drives has merit, the part about wearing out a drive before its time has no basis in fact. While having a work drive or even two might be good idea, it isn't a requirement by any stretch of the imagination. The bottleneck for this type of work isn't in the read/write cycles, its the CPU cycles. A good protocol for routine maintenence (defragging, registry management, and hard drive cleanup, and backup) will provide all the protection required for people with a single drive. It doesn't make sense to have people think they need more that they do, just to convert a few Blu-Ray movies. Drives are rated by MTBF (mean time between failures), in other words hours of use, not the number of read/write operations.

All corect apart from bolded. They are measured in MTBF but they assume a certain number of read\write operations per hour to determine their MTBF. So using 1 drive will reduce its MTBF however the MTBF is so high for modern drives that you wouldn't be reducing it by any amount measurable. Most drives fail due to bad manufacturing and were "destined" to fail in the first place.

It's only in recent years that common folk have had the luxery of having more than one drive as a norm. So GaPony is completely correct in his overall assertion. Especially in the CPU cycles being the bottleneck.

As said before, the hard drive thing is a red herring and won't be the cause of your slow encodes - during ENCODING. Muxing is a different story, but since the muxing phase only accounts for a TINY amount of the total time of making the bluray back it is neither here nor there.

[laserfan]

@GaPony

Well, you said "multiple drives [have] merit" but then you said "It doesn't make sense to have people think they need more".

It is indeed possible that the extremely large (and numerous) files involved in BD processing can bind-up a hard drive (especially a single hard drive) and bring a PC to its knees i.e. cause it to slow-down rather horribly. We don't know for sure with what's been related here, but that may indeed be what is happening to the OP.

[Furiousflea]

@GaPony

Well, you said "multiple drives [have] merit" but then you said "It doesn't make sense to have people think they need more".

It is indeed possible that the extremely large (and numerous) files involved in BD processing can bind-up a hard drive (especially a single hard drive) and bring a PC to its knees i.e. cause it to slow-down rather horribly. We don't know for sure with what's been related here, but that may indeed be what is happening to the OP.

no.

Please understand some people do know what is going on when stuff is being encoded - at least in terms of file operations which is the case here.

Let's imagine you copy an entire bluray on to another part of the same drive, and a assuming a drive that is highly fragmented even. This is not going to take more than an hour even for a full BD50, hell let's assume 2 hours so we can finally stick a pipe in all your mouths and you can smoke it :)

2 hours!

Now, how long does x264 take to encode a full bluray for most people? 8 hours on my quad core Q6600 at 3.4Ghz (fast). This guys CPU is much slower than mine, it's going to take him at least 10. during the encode the workflow goes like this

data in -> encode -> smaller data out (compressed)

The data in is going to be the same as the read operation when copying a bluray (very fast) -> encode as we have determined will take at least 10 hours for him (very slow) -> smaller data out, typically a bluray is reduced to BD9 the data out will be around a 5th of what went in so this will be even faster than copying a bluray from the same drive back to itself.

The bottleneck is the CPU!!!!! :eek:....ahhhh....calm:confused:

[Furiousflea]

@GaPony

Well, you said "multiple drives [have] merit" but then you said "It doesn't make sense to have people think they need more".

It is indeed possible that the extremely large (and numerous) files involved in BD processing can bind-up a hard drive (especially a single hard drive) and bring a PC to its knees i.e. cause it to slow-down rather horribly. We don't know for sure with what's been related here, but that may indeed be what is happening to the OP.

Yes multiple drives have merrit, he hasn't contradicted himself. Having double glazing has merrit, not everyone can justify the expense. It will help make things more comfortable but it is not going to cause you to die of cold if you don't have it. Unlike a window with no glass in it.

The correct analergy is double glazing\single pane - not double glazing\no glass.

We've all got a single pane already, sorry for my idiotic post but I can't think of a clearer way to say. Don't worry about having a single drive.

The drive could well be clogged up with crap, spyware etc...But he'd still be having problems with 2 drives if that was the cause of his problem.

[GaPony]

People don't need to add hard drives in order to copy a Blu-Ray movie. It would be a desireable upgrade, but not a requirement... was my point.

Since this was a thread for "Dummies", there may be people more susceptible to thinking they need to rush out and buy a new drive, when it may or may not help in any significant way. BD-Rebuilder by the nature of what's its doing is slow. I wanted to clarify that adding a hard drive or two or three won't significantly improve the overall time it takes a particular PC to complete a BD-Rebuilder session.

I just hate seeing people buy things they don't really need in hopes on gaing some huge performance benefit, then be disappointed by only a modest improvement.

My guess is that the vast majority of participants on this project are well beyond the "Dummies" stage in computer literacy, and if I ruffled any feathers I apologize. :)

[archaeo]

The bottleneck is the CPU!!!!! :eek:....ahhhh....calm:confused:

You may need to take a chill pill - no need to stomp up and down ;)

Obviously one doesn't need an additonal harddrive to do any backups. That wasn't my point.
But anyone who uses their OS drive for everything, including the intensive read/write cycles of a bluray backup is going to shorten the life of that drive and increase the possibility of a system crash. I'm sure if you polled advanced users, you would find the majority of us are using multiple drives. There's a reason, and it's not just about speed, per se.

And no, the bottleneck is not always at the CPU. That's a gross generalization.
Slowdowns can usually be attributed to one or more bottlenecks, which are caused when part of the system is not running fast enough to keep up with the demands placed on it. The most common bottlenecks occur for the following reasons:


-The system is out of processor power
-Slow disks or disk arrays aren't able to handle I/O requests quickly enough
-The system is starved for memory, so applications are forced to swap to disk


It is true to say that processor power may be the primary variable, but you cannot say it is the only variable.

[laserfan]

The OP said in Post 1 that after defragging:
...the encode it was moving much faster then at 50% it slowed way down again. I checked task manager and tsmuxer was running and I wondered if that was slowing it down.Now, he hasn't said anything that I can find about hard drive size or free space, and we know of course that a paging file (hidden) can be very large.

If you don't think a PC can grind to a halt when the HDD fills-up, then you're using a machine and/or OS with which I am unfamiliar! :rolleyes:

[Furiousflea]

You may need to take a chill pill - no need to stomp up and down ;)

Obviously one doesn't need an additonal harddrive to do any backups. That wasn't my point.
But anyone who uses their OS drive for everything, including the intensive read/write cycles of a bluray backup is going to shorten the life of that drive and increase the possibility of a system crash. I'm sure if you polled advanced users, you would find the majority of us are using multiple drives. There's a reason, and it's not just about speed, per se.

And no, the bottleneck is not always at the CPU. That's a gross generalization.
Slowdowns can usually be attributed to one or more bottlenecks, which are caused when part of the system is not running fast enough to keep up with the demands placed on it. The most common bottlenecks occur for the following reasons:


-The system is out of processor power
-Slow disks or disk arrays aren't able to handle I/O requests quickly enough
-The system is starved for memory, so applications are forced to swap to disk


It is true to say that processor power may be the primary variable, but you cannot say it is the only variable.

In so far as BD-Rebuilder encodibng is concerned, it is the only variable.

If something is going wrong, it will not be because of hard drive fragmentation. You might well know what you're talking about but there's some people in this thread who don't and are getting the wrong impression that fragmentation is the root of his problem...good pun :)

You are referring to good housekeeping of a hard drive, nothing more.

OP I would suggest it more likely that you have a load of crap on your system loaded in the background slowing things down and your computer is running out of memory or something like that. Causing paging to disk etc. This will not be solved by degragmenting but by being a bit more picky about the stuff you install on your computer. A program like "adaware" (google it) can clear out most of it if this is the problem.

[Furiousflea]

The OP said in Post 1 that after defragging:
Now, he hasn't said anything that I can find about hard drive size or free space, and we know of course that a paging file (hidden) can be very large.

If you don't think a PC can grind to a halt when the HDD fills-up, then you're using a machine and/or OS with which I am unfamiliar! :rolleyes:

It slowed way down because the 2nd pass takes 3x longer than the 1st when encoding video with x264 which is completely normal.

[Furiousflea]

The OP said in Post 1 that after defragging:
Now, he hasn't said anything that I can find about hard drive size or free space, and we know of course that a paging file (hidden) can be very large.

If you don't think a PC can grind to a halt when the HDD fills-up, then you're using a machine and/or OS with which I am unfamiliar! :rolleyes:

Did I say it couldn't. :rolleyes:

I said it had no place here for discusssion, because the bottelneck of the CPU is far more of bottleneck than the hard drive could ever be. WITH REGARDS TO BD-REBUILDER ENCODING.:stupid:

I just checked, we are in the BD-Rebuilder forum, not the "Basics to windows forum". Everything I'm saying is in context of BD-Rebuilder.

[GaPony]

There's a great deal we don't know about the conditions and specific configuration datman was working under.

I think we can agree on a few of his questions/points.

Defragging never hurts.

While a full hard drive operates slower than that same drive empty, its worth mentioning it takes a smaller percentage of occupation to begin to slow a big 1TB drive, than it does for a similar, but smaller 320gb, 500gb, etc. drive. Its a simple calculation of real estate that has to be covered.

Restarting after each BD-Rebuilder session doesn't hurt.

Selecting a source movie from the hard drive is preferrable to getting it from an optical drive.

As to what he should do to speed up his operations, there will be a wide range of suggestions.

As to what makes one movie proceed through the BD-Rebuilder process, faster or slower, than other movies is going to differ from movie to movie. Its impossible to make a general statement like "it takes x hours to copy a Blu-Ray movie". I've personally had many, many movies, which appear to be very similar in runtime, that took around 5 hours, and a couple that took over 12hrs.

I'm not sure how much of an argument can be made for or against any one thing, or few things as fas as being a bottleneck for a process that takes several hours to complete on even the fastest, most thoughtfully constructed purpose built PCs. People who look at their extremely long processing times just need to accept that copying a Blu-Ray isn't in the same universe as copying DVDs. I think that point may be causing some to think theres a problem, when one does not exist.

[datman]

Christ, next time I won't answer the questions that you asked. That wasn't an "I'm right , you're wrong" post. I answered your questions concisely thought that was what you wanted as you appeared confused in your OP...Cheek!

sorry I just wanted to let you know at what level I am at:thanks:

[laserfan]

sorry I just wanted to let you know at what level I am at:thanks:That's it? No other comments? There's been a lot of energy expended here (purportedly) for your benefit.

In case you don't know it, BD-Rebuilder uses a 2-pass encoding method, in order to hit a DVD-sized target. The 1st pass is a relatively quick "establish conditions & parameters" process which is relatively fast, but 2nd pass is the actuall encoding pass which can take 10 times as long (or longer) than the first. So that could be your "problem" but there's nothing to be done about that but be patient.

If your available hard drive capacity is insufficient to the task, as it fills with data it can slow down your drive--of course if it fills-up completely it will stop your PC dead-in-its tracks.

[Furiousflea]

sorry I just wanted to let you know at what level I am at:thanks:

That's ok. I got pretty wound up lol. Sorry being abit full on :)

If you could give us some more details we can most likely help you. My ramblings have just been trying to make clear that it's unlikely to be your hard drive, and could just be "normal" as laserfan has said ^

Could you try it again, and when it appears to stop at 50% which is when the 2nd pass starts could you tell us if it actually has stopped (it will say down the bottom how many frames have been encoded, if that stays at a certain numer and doesn't change then you do have a problem). If it's just going up very slowly then it is working, it will just take a long time and you will need to be patient.

No hard feelings and please accept my apologies for my harsh tone.

[datman]

Ha, ha! No, there are plenty more of us! :D

I don't think you've laid-out your hard drive(s) for us, but one suggestion I have is to have at least two, and preferably three, hard drives. I have 3: the C: drive contains the OS and Windows paging file, the D: drive is for most "working files" and temp folders, and the E: drive is for the "save to" material i.e. program output (tho I don't think BD-RB lets you output to a different drive yet).

You might be suffering from fragmentation as you build temp files, thus slowing down the process. At least, get a 2nd hard drive and use IT for your BD-RB working folder vs. the C: drive. If you are reading your originals not from a BD-ROM drive but instead from a hard drive, it would be preferable that that drive be a 3rd drive, or at least put the isos then on your C: drive (if you have a D) such that you are not Reading and Writing to the same drive during processing. Hope that made/makes sense to you... :)

What my HDD set up is 120g ide Cdrive, 500g sata D&E, 6-1tb usb drives for processing and storage. I like how I set up the usb drives (for now) I have 2 soon to be 3 computers to watch BD movies on. I assigned each a letter, the same on all computers. Made folders with shortcuts on every computer. If I want to watch a movie locate which drive it's in from the shortcut folder plug it in and watch the movie. Some drives don’t get plugged in for months. They sit on a shelf away from harm.

I had been using my cdrive for OS and programs download, processing and storage when to one of the other drives. I would work out of one drive until it's filled up, the rip then the various processing folders (to be deleted along with the rip) then the final ISO file. I just experimented with moving the BDRB working folder to the cdrive. There may have been some other reason for my sudden burst of speed.

[datman]

no.


This guys CPU is much slower than mine, it's going to take him at least 10. during the encode the workflow goes like this

:

I have a AMD Phenom 940 quad at 3.1. It only a couple of weeks old so still getting it tweaked

[datman]

Quote:
Originally Posted by datman
...the encode it was moving much faster then at 50% it slowed way down again. I checked task manager and tsmuxer was running and I wondered if that was slowing it down.



The OP said in Post 1 that after defragging:
Now, he hasn't said anything that I can find about hard drive size or free space, and we know of course that a paging file (hidden) can be very large.

If you don't think a PC can grind to a halt when the HDD fills-up, then you're using a machine and/or OS with which I am unfamiliar! :rolleyes:

I was working with what turned out to be a Corrupt file it slowed down because of the errors

[datman]

OP I would suggest it more likely that you have a load of crap on your system loaded in the background slowing things down and your computer is running out of memory or something like that. Causing paging to disk etc. This will not be solved by degragmenting but by being a bit more picky about the stuff you install on your computer. A program like "adaware" (google it) can clear out most of it if this is the problem.


I have a dedicated HTPC that only goes on the internet for updates I have virus protection but close it at every start, unless I plan to be on the net.

[datman]

That's it? No other comments? There's been a lot of energy expended here (purportedly) for your benefit.

In case you don't know it, BD-Rebuilder uses a 2-pass encoding method, in order to hit a DVD-sized target. The 1st pass is a relatively quick "establish conditions & parameters" process which is relatively fast, but 2nd pass is the actuall encoding pass which can take 10 times as long (or longer) than the first. So that could be your "problem" but there's nothing to be done about that but be patient.

If your available hard drive capacity is insufficient to the task, as it fills with data it can slow down your drive--of course if it fills-up completely it will stop your PC dead-in-its tracks.


The time I was waiting was the first "phase" not 1st or 2nd pass. beside it was my source file that was bad

[datman]

Defragging never hurts.

.

One thing I have found by defragging daily it doesn't take 2 days to do it

[datman]

Thanks to everyone this has been great, I am learning alot

[Furiousflea]

Quote:
Originally Posted by datman
...the encode it was moving much faster then at 50% it slowed way down again. I checked task manager and tsmuxer was running and I wondered if that was slowing it down.





I was working with what turned out to be a Corrupt file it slowed down because of the errors

Do you know why the file was corrupt? Are your other encodes now going ok?

I ask because I assume you've overclocked the CPU (3.1Ghz) By doing so you will most likely have overclocked your RAM also and this can cause things like corruption of files, especially when you copy large files.

[GaPony]

datman,

Was it you who mentioned that you had preprocessed your movies through TSMuxer in order to save space on your hard drive? I tried to find the post I'm referring to, but couldn't. Anyway, if that's the case, it may be where some problem may exist.

[datman]

Do you know why the file was corrupt? Are your other encodes now going ok?

I ask because I assume you've overclocked the CPU (3.1Ghz) By doing so you will most likely have overclocked your RAM also and this can cause things like corruption of files, especially when you copy large files.


About 2 weeks ago I had a wierd graphic driver error, perhaps from doing several encodes without restarting. My usb drive got scrambled I ran chkdsk and patched it back together. It looked like everything was ok. This movie The Last Emperor was on it. Last night I processed the file using other tools just to view it. You can't watch rips in pdvd 8 and 3319a may not play un-muxed newer rips. Anyhow there are short clips of the movie Patton in it. So the rest of it could be whacked too. I'm going to re-rip TLE and see how it goes

[datman]

datman,

Was it you who mentioned that you had preprocessed your movies through TSMuxer in order to save space on your hard drive? I tried to find the post I'm referring to, but couldn't. Anyway, if that's the case, it may be where some problem may exist.

I just do this because most of my files I processed months ago and for the most part I have not had to much trouble except where I had something set up wrong, so working off of the pre-muxed file gives me exactly the backup I want and fewer steps running BDRB

[GaPony]

About 2 weeks ago I had a wierd graphic driver error, perhaps from doing several encodes without restarting. My usb drive got scrambled I ran chkdsk and patched it back together. It looked like everything was ok. This movie The Last Emperor was on it. Last night I processed the file using other tools just to view it. You can't watch rips in pdvd 8 and 3319a may not play un-muxed newer rips. Anyhow there are short clips of the movie Patton in it. So the rest of it could be whacked too. I'm going to re-rip TLE and see how it goes

An external USB drive might be good for storing movies on, but I wouldn't want to use one for the processing of movies. The USB port is very limited in its ability to transfer large files. An eSATA drive would be a much better alternative and not too expensive to cobble together, if your mobo doesn't support it. The file transfer speed would be faster by at least 3x.

[datman]

An external USB drive might be good for storing movies on, but I wouldn't want to use one for the processing of movies. The USB port is very limited in its ability to transfer large files. An eSATA drive would be a much better alternative and not too expensive to cobble together, if your mobo doesn't support it. The file transfer speed would be faster by at least 3x.

That's a good idea but I just ordered 2 320g sata drives.

Rather than start a new thread I have some system changes I'm posting then here. So please share with me any suggestions.

A brief summery I use my HTPC to rip, process, store and watch all my movies. I just started using BDRB and I soon found out my AMD 5000+ was way to slow. So I built a new HTPC with a Phenom 940 quad. Like many of us I’m processing around the clock so if I decide to watch a movie at the spur of the moment, I can’t because I’m way to far into an encode.

So I’m rebuilding my P4 northwoods Internet pc and use my old AMD 5000+ and MB. It’s all going to work out pretty smooth. This way I can watch movie and encode at the same time.
My questions are I currently use a ATI 2600xt GPU needing a 2nd card I ordered a ATI HD 3870 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102719 that should much better. Being that I will most likely always be watching from the 5000+ should I put the 3870 into it? Or is there some possible lose in quality or performance that I may want the best of the best installed on the same computer? Does that make since? So the 940 and the 3870 on the same system.

I also needed a SATA HDD to simplify the install with the MB’s 1 IDE slot. I ordered 2. After the responses tonight this is how I want to set them up.

Put one in each HTPC, partition both at 150g the cdrive(OS) on the 150g side and folders for rips, working, and final post processed video folders on the other. So in theory it should be fast transfer from one folder to the other while the OS is uncluttered. After I’m happy with the backup convert to ISO and save to one of the USB drives. Contents of the folders deleted at completion

Well do I have my head up my arse :stupid:

[GaPony]

Well do I have my head up my arse :stupid:

Probably... but don't we all from time to time. :)

I would put the best video card into the PC from which I was going to play my movies. The system that does all the heavy lifting doesn't need much of a video card.

I'm a little surprised that you would get 320gb drives. The cost difference to 500gb is minimal...literally only a few bucks.

I would likely partition differently. If I were building a single purpose PC (BD-Rebuilder specific) I would make the boot partition much smaller... maybe 20gb and leave the remaining 300 for the work. You really don't gain performance, but it will be much easier to keep the boot partition defragged, and by virtue of its small size, it should perform very well.

The PC that you use for viewing the movies will likely need a larger boot partition because you'll have alot more software installed, but shouldn't need more than around 80gb for most applications. If you use a program like Partition Magic, you can adjust partition sizes on the fly.

You'll probably want a basic network setup between the two PCs in order to transfer the copies from the "worker bee" PC to the viewer, or even to simply access the movie for playback from the "viewing" PC.

This would free up the external drive for simply archival purposes, or system backup.

Since I don't know exactly how you're putting this all together, I'm just speculating based on how I would do it. But my configuration would be based upon two PCs, sharing a HDTV as the monitor. I would probably go even further to add a KVM switch in order to keep clutter down by sharing the mouse and keyboard between the two PCs, as well.

[Furiousflea]

Saving to USB drives....

This all sounds a little....mad?

Personally I'm using a cheap 2 drive nas with 2 x 1.5TB drives in for 3TB storage before formatting. Total cost £300. You can store all your stuff on there and it is linked to my router, so anything that is wireless or wired can acces it. It's not a goog idea to watch blurays over a wireless connection though. Anyway, reason I'm saying this is because it sounds like you could cut down on a lot of hardware and streamline your setup and make things a lot less cluttered, both physically and in your mind! ;)

You would only need a reasonably fast dual core to play your media from the NAS (your 5000+ would suffice) and your media would be accessible by anything else you decided to add in the future. It also uses very little electricity and will save you money.

I was doubtful about owning one, but best thing I've ever done is get rid of all those hard drives and bits of storage all over the place.

[GaPony]

Did you read the part about 320gb drives? I think he may be working on a smaller scale. :)

You may have also missed the part about running BD-Rebuilder and watching movies at the same time.

[Furiousflea]

I mean just from a storage point of view. He said he had several external USB drives for storage. Just seemed a bit weird and could be simplified. I won't get into the rest of it lol...Sounds awfully confusing :)

[datman]

I mean just from a storage point of view. He said he had several external USB drives for storage. Just seemed a bit weird and could be simplified. I won't get into the rest of it lol...Sounds awfully confusing :)

I agree it does sound goofy. Might be my way of explaining it. However once it’s set up it really works good. I have to make thing very simple so if my wife wants to watch a movie she can locate the correct drive.

I started using these 1 tb winbooks I can get 30-35 BD movies on each as needed I just get a additional one. As I said I assign a letter to each J,K,L,M I assign the same letter on each computer. Every time any drive is plugged in it is always recognized by that letter no matter how many other drive are plugged in. Every computer has folders for each drive with shortcut to each movie on it’s desktop. So if I or my wife want to watch a movie open the each folder until you see the movie, say drive K. Then you plug K in and click the shortcut your done. The exact same steps on any computer. This saves power and possibly wear on the drive.

[GaPony]

:eek: I'd shoot myself! :)

Maybe you need one or two of these... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153066

You'll get all the benefits of what you do now, without a bunch of USB drives hanging around. Its like a toaster... just pop in the bare drive and use your shortcuts. You also don't have to pay for all those enclosures. It would definitely simplify things for you.

[datman]

:eek: I'd shoot myself! :)

Maybe you need one or two of these... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153066

You'll get all the benefits of what you do now, without a bunch of USB drives hanging around. Its like a toaster... just pop in the bare drive and use your shortcuts. You also don't have to pay for all those enclosures. It would definitely simplify things for you.


you think this is why I'm going nuts:p

actually that would be the same if you have a bunch exturnal or a bunch of internal drives,or couple hundred discs lying around you pick your poison. The only right way is setting up a server.

[datman]

Saving to USB drives....





You would only need a reasonably fast dual core to play your media from the NAS (your 5000+ would suffice) and your media would be accessible by anything else you decided to add in the future. It also uses very little electricity and will save you money.

I was doubtful about owning one, but best thing I've ever done is get rid of all those hard drives and bits of storage all over the place.


oh now I'm trackin with ya. Yea I should think about moving in this direction I know little of it

[GaPony]

you think this is why I'm going nuts:p

actually that would be the same if you have a bunch exturnal or a bunch of internal drives,or couple hundred discs lying around you pick your poison. The only right way is setting up a server.

A server is a better way to go... a video streaming implant to your brain would maybe be the best... but I shouldn't let the cat out of the bag too soon. :D:p:D

There's a million ways to get to where any of us ultimately want to be. Unfortunately, most of us also have a budget to work from. Since you have an old PC laying around, you might want to Goggle "Build your own NAS". There are some very cost effective ways to get it done.

[datman]

I'm a little surprised that you would get 320gb drives. The cost difference to 500gb is minimal...literally only a few bucks.

I would likely partition differently. If I were building a single purpose PC (BD-Rebuilder specific) I would make the boot partition much smaller... maybe 20gb and leave the remaining 300 for the work. You really don't gain performance, but it will be much easier to keep the boot partition defragged, and by virtue of its small size, it should perform very well.

The PC that you use for viewing the movies will likely need a larger boot partition because you'll have alot more software installed, but shouldn't need more than around 80gb for most applications. If you use a program like Partition Magic, you can adjust partition sizes on the fly.

You'll probably want a basic network setup between the two PCs in order to transfer the copies from the "worker bee" PC to the viewer, or even to simply access the movie for playback from the "viewing" PC.

This would free up the external drive for simply archival purposes, or system backup.

Since I don't know exactly how you're putting this all together, I'm just speculating based on how I would do it. But my configuration would be based upon two PCs, sharing a HDTV as the monitor. I would probably go even further to add a KVM switch in order to keep clutter down by sharing the mouse and keyboard between the two PCs, as well.

80g is enough for vista? 80/170 split sounds better. I have partition magic. That is the best way after windows is loaded?

Now that it's all said a done. I needed a bigger power supply, 4g of pc 1066 memory anyway. I have an old case I'm going to put the whole P4 system (for internet) Put the 650w PS and memory in the 940 using one or those 250g hhds http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136010

The other in the 5000+ which will be set up just for watching movies both sitting side by side. I have an office behind my familyroom with all the equipment next time I clean it up I'll post a picture. A wall of stuff, look at the wiring you will see NASA's got nothing on me:rolleyes:I have a KVM switch

[GaPony]

80g is enough for vista? 80/170 split sounds better. I have partition magic. That is the best way after windows is loaded?



I thought you had a 320gb drive... which one us of can't add? :) (80+170=250?)

Vista only requires a 20gb hard drive with 15gb free... so you can figure it out from there based upon what other software you may want to install on the boot partition. 80gb is likey nearly twice what you'll really need.

Its the storage space that needs to be maximized when you consider say a 35gb movie ripped to the hard drive. You have the initial 35gb, plus up to another 50gb for the actual conversion to BD25 (The final 25gb output and the workfiles combined), so you could be looking at up to 85gb for a single movie, at least temporarily.

[datman]

I thought you had a 320gb drive... which one us of can't add? :) (80+170=250?)

.

It was my bad eyes and wishful thinking I looked at the newegg add again and it was 250g still at $39 each free shipping I can make it work.

I got my P4 internet computer up and running in the much smaller old case. It is working but now it won't turn off I have read about that, either way this may be a temperary computer till I get everything dialed in

[datman]

hey guys,

well I'm up and running with the 2 HTPCs. I have to say this is the way for me.:D


I'm running W7-64 and the encodes are working good. Thanks to jdobbs and tekmobile . You must have seen my rash of posts in the bugs thread I was so :confused:

W7 is great for this limited use thus far. One thing with my W7 install none of the code keys will activate it. I don't know who to call. Well I got 29 more days

[GaPony]

You may need to re-register for a new key. Here's the link... http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

[datman]

You may need to re-register for a new key. Here's the link... http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx


I have been there. If you go there put your info in you will get a key, hit the back button you will get another key. There are 5 keys I think we are all using the same keys. Imay be wrong:confused:

[GaPony]

I think you're right. I saw a posting someplace that argued there were only about 25 keys, except for the first few unique keys that were issued before the website crashed, on the first day of the program.

If you want to put Windows 7 on multiple computers, you can use the same key for all of them.

[datman]

I am trying this encode tonight I am doing it from a protected ISO strait to BDRB 19.6 there are 13 different files that it's going through, (phase 1,1st pass, 2nd pass) it's in 2 of 13 now.It looked like the program paused at the end of 1 of 13 and the was a black dos screen that disappeared when I clicked on it and the program then started 2 of 13. I hope I don't have hang around to start the remaining 11 parts.


It looks like it would be faster to use tssplitter and tsmuxer.

[datman]

it went strait 3 of 13. Before when I saw the black window when the program restarted it had to do phase 1 again. This time it didn't .

I think it was that x264 crash and then a older x264 completes the encode.

this should be a good test, the best quality to a BD25 size and not reencoding the audio

[datman]

One thing I did find odd and for me lets know BDRB is not yet the single encoding software I need. When I got done with pineapple express saving it to a BD25 size it was something like 22.35g and the audio that I had checked to not recode ac3 was 448. I did it again the old way tssplitter and tsmuxer twice. I ended up with a file 19.2g and had full audio

[datman]

The errors I was trying to post in the bugs thread seemed to happen on particular movies that may or may not be a bug. On the last one “ Personal effects” I tried 3 or 4 different times each under a different set of parameters. The 1st off an unprotected ISO rip one with a tsmuxer-ed file and one using 19.06. Then I tried off the disc, all failed.

Then I tried to play the disc and it won’t play I plan to return it.

It seems to me every encode is completely different and the processing is different. On my system a normal encode takes 6 to 8 hours and the 1st pass speed can have speeds anywhere from 1.10 to 1.65 the 2nd pass less than half of that. It’s unknown to me why there can be so much difference from one encode to another. The one I on now is off a HDD archive. I have not decided if it is better to work off the disc or continue working off my files. It is very slow .27 I have had some nearly 3x that

[jdobbs]

The difference between first and second pass is normal. You typically don't run a lot of the high-end features on the first pass in order to speed it up -- but you need them for the second in order to a good final outpu.

[datman]

The difference between first and second pass is normal. You typically don't run a lot of the high-end features on the first pass in order to speed it up -- but you need them for the second in order to a good final outpu.


I know and expect the 2nd pass to be 1/3 the speed of the 1st.

One thing I have noticed and it may be partly because of the version of BDRB I was using at the time. I was having some encode that were much faster and tword the end they would gain speed knocking 2 hours off the encode (a guess) The end results looked good. These latest versions the speed starts out high and settles down about 3% into and stays there till the end