Rebuild time almost doubled recently - ???

[nathanaa]

DVD-RB 1.28.2 + CCE-Basic + AviSynth 2.57, with Menu reencoding and VBR redistribution turned on.

The average time for a rebuild has usually been about 6-8 hours for a disc (I use an older laptop). About 2 weeks ago, it suddenly jumped to 10-12 hours to rebuild a DVD. I am wondering if I switched a setting somewhere (kind of assuming I did), as I had been trying to back up American Gangster - Unrated Extended Edition, and kept getting really bad flaws (choppy video, a/v would go out of synch, etc.). It was barely under 8gb just for the "movie only" setting, and I was trying to get it down to a DVD-5 size. Anyway, I recall looking around in the setting to see if there was a way to increase quality output by adding passes or somesuch that I had recalled reading about here.

Thus, I would appreciate some advice on where to look to see if I changed something. I am not a programmer, so I tend NOT to mess with settings and such, but I'm not sure what a setting might have been at originally, such as CCE's VBR Passes (which is currently set to 2). Let me know if I need to post any other info that would be helpful.

Thanks!

[jdobbs]

Sounds like something else is running on your computer. Have done any updates or settings changes to your anti-virus software lately (that's the most likely culprit)? Was a scan running at the time of the rebuild?

Another possibility: Have your drive been defragmented recently?

Third: Is the disc getting withing 10-15% of full? That can really slow things down as well.

[nathanaa]

Generally, nothing else is running other than the usual antivirus and such when I am doing a rebuild. I do recall that a recent download and update to .NET framework (not entirely sure what that is) happened, to version 3 or 3.5 or something? That's the only really out of the usual update that has occurred, it was a big one too if I recall correctly.

I don't think there was a scan running when the rebuilds were happening. This isn't just one time though - this is for the last 10-15 discs. I only really realized it was such a large increase in time as I have been home a lot lately. I usually just set up a batch job and let it run for a day or two, but the last couple batches, which should have taken ~36-40 hours (usually) took almost 70 hours to run.

The drive(s) have been defragged, yes, I do that pretty often, for all three drives. I have external drive I:\ that the original ripped file is on, an external drive H:\ that the output files go to, and then the laptop C drive of course. My disc maintenance is regular, I reboot often, and currently there are hundreds of gigs worth of space available, so the problem likely isn't lack of space.

Any other ideas or thoughts? I'm at a bit of a loss honestly as to what to try.

[Sophocles]

It was barely under 8gb just for the "movie only" setting, and I was trying to get it down to a DVD-5 size. Anyway

Your slower results are probably a combination of things including those mentioned by jdobbs. The storage size of a movie on its original disc doesn't tell the whole story when it comes to reencode times. Once in a while you are going to run into movies that will take longer. The American Gangster - Unrated Extended Edition is 158 minutes in length which means that if everything on your computer is as it was before attempting the movie it is still going to take longer to reencode than a standard 100 to 120 minute movie. That isn't enough by itself to explain the difference but it could be a fair chunk of it.

[nathanaa]

But it hasn't only been for that size/type of job. Every type of disc I've done lately - full movie disc, movie only, episodic disc - they've *all* jumped from an average of 6-8 hours to an average of 10-11 hours. That's why I'm scratching my head.

[jdobbs]

Generally, nothing else is running other than the usual antivirus and such when I am doing a rebuild. I do recall that a recent download and update to .NET framework (not entirely sure what that is) happened, to version 3 or 3.5 or something? That's the only really out of the usual update that has occurred, it was a big one too if I recall correctly.

I don't think there was a scan running when the rebuilds were happening. This isn't just one time though - this is for the last 10-15 discs. I only really realized it was such a large increase in time as I have been home a lot lately. I usually just set up a batch job and let it run for a day or two, but the last couple batches, which should have taken ~36-40 hours (usually) took almost 70 hours to run.

The drive(s) have been defragged, yes, I do that pretty often, for all three drives. I have external drive I:\ that the original ripped file is on, an external drive H:\ that the output files go to, and then the laptop C drive of course. My disc maintenance is regular, I reboot often, and currently there are hundreds of gigs worth of space available, so the problem likely isn't lack of space.

Any other ideas or thoughts? I'm at a bit of a loss honestly as to what to try. You haven't enabled any power-saving options in the notebook's bios, have you? I remember doing that once and watched my system come to a near standstill.

[burfadel]

Yeah power saving = long time to do stuff = more power used overall. Damned hippies :sly:

Its fair enough to power save when truly idle, not when you're doing stuff!

In terms of encoding speed, I'd say you have either inadvertently changed a setting or like others have said you need to defrag! Try Auslogics Disk defrag, its free and does a better job that the Microsoft one (and its fast):

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download

Also try running this, may help overall as well:
http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/registry-cleaner/download

Both are updated fairly frequently so keep checking back.

[manolito]

I do recall that a recent download and update to .NET framework (not entirely sure what that is) happened, to version 3 or 3.5 or something? That's the only really out of the usual update that has occurred, it was a big one too if I recall correctly.
This could very well be the cause for the slowdown, especially since you mentioned that you use an older laptop. On my rather ancient machine (1.1 GHz Celeron, 512 MB Ram) .NET framework 3.5 really made a huge difference. Mainly swapping stuff from Ram to HD increased significantly.

To fix this I tried a couple of tuning tools, but only one of them made a difference (CacheMan XP from Outertech). I ended up removing .NET framework 3.5 from my computer. So far all the .NET software I use works happily with version 2.0 of the framework.

Give it a try and let us know...

Cheers
manolito

[steptoe]

If you use Paint.net like I do for basic, but quick editing of images it INSISTS on .net 3.5 as it uses parts of the latest release to run it, but I don't notice a slow down

Then again, I'm on a quad Q6600 running at 3.4ghz

[nathanaa]

Ok, I decided to uninstall the .NET 3.5 and see what happened. I processed Young Indiana Jones S1 D1 and it took 8.5 hours. I then did a batch job of S1 D6/7/8, and it took 8.25-8.5 hours per disc on average. Those numbers are much better than the 10-12 hour averages I had been experiencing previously.

Then I wondered if perhaps as Young Indiana Jones isn't exactly visual FX-heavy that maybe I'd get a different result with something "tougher". Thus, last night I ran BSG2003 S4.5 D1 through to see what I would get. Process started at 22:31 and ended this morning at 6:37, an 8-hour job.

This does seem to indicate that the .NET 3.5 was the primary cause of the longer run times.

I'm wondering now though, should I also uninstall the .NET 3.0 that is on my 5-6 year old laptop? I think that was downloaded and installed about 2 months ago, perhaps 3. If I don't need it for anything else, and I've been happy with the results I've been getting before I had the .NET 3.0, I guess as a layman I don't see why I would need/want it.

However, I'm happy to hear thoughts/advice/ideas on the issue either way. As a non-programmer, maybe I just don't understand why I would want to keep it.

Any other thoughts or advice I am happy to hear/consider. Thanks for the input already received, as well!

[manolito]

.NET Framework had a bad reputation from day one. A lot of people complained that it played havoc on their machines.

My advice is pretty radical, but if you do not use any software which needs .NET then I recommend to get rid of the .NET Framework altogether.

On my machine I have .NET Framework versions 1.1 and 2.0 installed. Version 1.1 is needed for Cuttermaran, and VOB2MPG needs v 2.0. (Version 2 is not backward compatible to v. 1, so both versions have to be installed.) But even without v. 3.0 and 3.5 my computer does feel less responsive than without any .NET Framework.


Cheers
manolito