Converting Huffyuv AVI to MPEG-2 with CCE2.5 rather slow?

[Boulder]

I've started converting some better quality VHS movies to SVCD format by using VirtualDub for capturing (Huffyuv compression) and CCE for MPEG-2 conversion (3- or 4-pass VBR used). I use AviSynth as the frameserver.

However, the conversion seems to be very slow compared to DVD2SVCD conversion. Is this normal? Converting a Huffyuv AVI to MPEG-2 has a speed of 0.6 at max, but using DVD2SVCD gets a bit over 1.0.

The AVI was captured in 720x576, 25fps PAL.

Here's my AviSynth script:

LoadPlugIn("e:\program files\dvd2svcd\simpleresize\simpleresize.dll")
UnAlignedSplice(SegmentedAVISource("c:\temp\captures\bladerunner.avi"), SegmentedAVISource("d:\temp\captures\bladerunner.avi"), SegmentedAVISource("e:\temp\captures\bladerunner.avi"))
Letterbox(0,16)
SimpleResize(480,576)

The AVIs had to be spilled to different drives as I've got a FAT32 system so the maximum drive size is 32 gigs. Letterbox is used to remove the garbage which occurs on VHS capture. Using AviSynth built-in bilinear resize is not much slower, which I really wonder as well.

System specs:
Abit KT7A, memory settings at max
TB1400, FSB140
512MB memory
Both HDs are 40GB 7200rpm Maxtors
UltraDMA5 is enabled on both drives
Windows XP and 98SE tried, 98SE is a bit slower

Is it just that ripping from DVD and converting to MPEG-2 is faster than converting from Huffyuv compressed AVI or am I doing something wrong here.

Thanks in advance, every possible solution is appreciated greatly.

[avin]

Not sure if this answers your question ..

I've found that the size of the AVI file that you convert makes a difference, keeping length constant.

I did some trials of a scene captured from DV: I had a divx, huffyuv and uncompressed avi files. I encoded in CCE and found that the smaller the file size, the faster it took to encode. The divx version took half the time of the huffyuv version, and the uncompressed was about triple of the huffyuv version.

I don't think it's the compression algorithms itself since the uncompressed avi took longer than the compressed versions.

[Boulder]

That could be true.. strange but true;) I'll test the thing today, I've got a 1h30min movie next in my list, so we'll see what happens. I'll post the results here, it might help someone in the future.

The encoding seems to be going at 0.638 quite steadily with Blade Runner (1h51min).

[Uli]

Originally posted by avin
...I encoded in CCE and found that the smaller the file size, the faster it took to encode. The divx version took half the time of the huffyuv version, and the uncompressed was about triple of the huffyuv version.

That indicates that you have a slow harddrive. Decompression with cpu is faster then reading the uncompressed data directly from harddrive. So: The bigger the file, the longer the cpu has to wait for the harddrive.

greetz, Uli

[Boulder]

It seems that the speed limit with AVIs on my computer is around 0.6-0.65, no matter what the size is. I'm just wondering why encoding VOB files is almost twice as fast, The Evil Dead is currently being encoded at 1.23...

[jdobbs]

I think it's just that you're working with a larger source. I've done similar work with DV format. I take VHS output and let my DV camera act as a digital converter/feed into my firewire port. The segmented AVIs get up in the 30-40Gbyte range... I also use AVISynth for decoding. While CCE gets a speed of about 1.25 from a VOB, it only gets about .8 from the DV AVIs. It makes sense, I guess, since you have to read 4-5 times as much data from the huge source.

You're already using 7200rpm UltraDMA-5 mode drives... it doesn't get much faster... (ATA-133?)

[Boulder]

HD speed doesn't seem to be the main thing here, I use Multiword DMA in Win98 and it's just as fast (or slow) as UltraDMA in WinXP. Those 100MB/s speeds are just theoretical, no drive can do that these days and yet they keep on pushing new UDMA specs to the market. A regular 7200rpm HD should get a burst speed of about 50MB/s so there's still room for the manufacturers to enhance the performance. RAID would probably increase the performance but not much. I guess that the next thing to buy is a new DDR motherboard and memory.