unusually long hours i have seen this thread before but can't find it now

[azurenights]

hi i was using dvd2svcd 4 pass with CCE and the second time the movie was being encoded it said that it would take 60 hours. Could someone explain to me what is going on?? I have Celeron II 600 with 128mb ram. I have seen someone ask this question before but i can't find the thread anymore. thanks for any replies

[marks430]

Hi azurenights

I have two different machines I use for DVD2SVCD. The first is a dual Pentium III 1GHz with 512 MB. This machine used to have win2k and worked flawlessly with DVD2SVCD, until I installed XP. Under Win2K I would get a CCE realtime of about .84 on NTSC 16:9 movies. I always do a 3 pass VBR, which IMO gives very good quality results. The second machine is a Celeron II 900MHz with 256MB. This machine still runs win2k and creates SVCDs flawlessly, just a little slower. The CCE realtime on this machine is about .54 on NTSC 16:9 movies.

If IVTC is used, it will drastically slow down the encoding process, I can't remember the numbers, because it does not happen often, but when it does, CCE realtime is about half of normal.

One problem you do have is the amount of memory in your machine. This can cause the program to run slow or to not work at all.

Ignoring the memory, and based on the speed I get from my Celeron, I would expect your CCE realtime to be somewhere around .36, but, with the low amount of memory, it is probably lower than that.

A 90 minute movie encoded with a realtime of .36 using 4 pass VBR would take about 20 hours. If IVTC is used, double that time. I'm not sure what effect not having enough memory would have but I'm sure it would slow things down further.

Hope this helps to answer your question.
Mark

[azurenights]

thank you for the reply mark

the movie i am encoding is a pal source so i don't need to ivtc. The speeds i am getting was .098 which is pretty slow

during my first pass of the movie i was getting a speed of 0.222 around the first few hours of encoding. I went to bed and then the speed slowed to 0.09 when i checked it the next morning. Do you know what would have caused the speed to go down?????

[marks430]

Is this the only movie that this happens on? If so, then it could be a problem with the rip and you might try using Vstrip or SmartRipper.

Is the speed it started at average for other movies you have done?

[azurenights]

I did rip the movie using smart ripper. When i encoded shorter films i got a speed of about 0.222 and it was maintained throughout the whole encoding process. These short clips only took about an hour or two to encode. I encoded another movie before the speed of the movie was like 0.117 during the whole process. I used smart ripper to rip the movie too. Do you think it has something to do with my hardware???? i was reading a post before about encoding a video and hard disk usage and weardown. Does encoding a video wear down your hard drive quicker???? thanks

[marks430]

You could have possibly gotten a bad rip. The CCE speed does not usually change significantly after the first few minutes. Is the original disc scratched? You might try re-ripping the movie using the internal routines.

Your system would definitely give you better speed if you had some additional memory. I've read posts where people with 128MB have gotten substantial increases in speed by adding additional memory.

Other things you can do to help your speed is if you have two hard drives, store the VOBs on one drive and use the other for the working directory. Also, make sure that no other programs are running in the background as they'll eat up your available memory.

Since the encoding process is data intensive, it will add some wear and tear on your hard drive. How much of an effect that will have on the overall life of the hard drive is a guess.

Lots of Luck