FIXED: Took 12 HOURS to burn a VCD

[kjacobs]

Using MF 3 and tried to burn a VCD for an hour TV show. It was recorded using DVD Standard Play. BUT it took 12 HOURS to burn the VCD! What am I missing here? On another forum someone said that reencoding from DVD took awhile. But that long?

Ken

 

[HDTVMan]

Do a Checkdisk on your hard drive. Some clusters or worse might be going bad.

 

[Megatomic]

I believe it's your system Ken. It's outdated by a few years.

 

[TourGuide]

While your system isn't bleeding edge, it should not have taken that long to. When I was working on my Athlon 3000+ with 1 gig RAM it would take ~ 40-50 minutes to reencode and burn the disk. 12 hours is excessive. Something has to be causing that.

I will say I noticed a HUGE increase in reencoding performance when I switched over to A64 - 3500+

 

[TourGuide]

Originally posted by: Megatomic
I believe it's your system Ken. It's outdated by a few years.

Speedy video editing and authoring DOES require a heavy duty box for sure.

 

[kjacobs]

I'm SO sorry guys! I have the wrong specs listed. The PC I am using now is:

AMD Athlon 1600+ (1.4 Ghz)
512 RAM (Pc3200)
New 160 GB WD 7200 rpm 8 cache hard drive (20 GB Windows partition/130 GB data partition for recordings only)
ATI Radeon 9250 video card
Epox 8KHA+ mobo

Does that help any?

Ken

 

[HDTVMan]

Originally posted by: kjacobs
I'm SO sorry guys! I have the wrong specs listed. The PC I am using now is:

AMD Athlon 1600+ (1.4 Ghz)
512 RAM (Pc3200)
New 160 GB WD 7200 rpm 8 cache hard drive (20 GB Windows partition/130 GB data partition for recordings only)
ATI Radeon 9250 video card
Epox 8KHA+ mobo

Does that help any?

Ken

Yea your machine limited. Need some CPU horsepower when doing video conversions.

 

[kjacobs]

I thought the Hauppauge card would compensate for that?

 

[kjacobs]

Update: I recorded using the VCD format and then burned to a CD. It took NO time at all!

Ken

 

[TourGuide]

Originally posted by: kjacobs
Update: I recorded using the VCD format and then burned to a CD. It took NO time at all!

Ken

Well, VCD is intended for CD media. VCD stands for Video - CD if I remember correctly.

The hauppage card will not dramatically change the speed at which you can encode and burn discs. The video and capture cards have a minimal role in this. The two most important parts of your computer where video encoding is concerned are RAM and CPU. Having a gig of RAM or more helps and an A64 3000+ or higher too.

 

[jdogg707]

The Hauppauge card helps when recording the show, by doing it in hardware, but it will be your actual CPU that is doing the re-encoding, which is what took so long. A faster CPU and a bit more RAM would make a night and day difference.

 

[IeraseU]

For this type of work I actually recomend a dual core CPU.

 

[gsellis]

Yes. DVD encode on a 1.6 class machine is slow. I would start the encode before going to bed as it did take more than 5-6 hours on my old machine. That was with a 1.6a Intel. A 1600 AMD would not be as fast at that task (but it would play games better ).

 

[Peter]

Yes, a high quality DVD encode is that demanding on CPU load. At least you know that old box is running stable as a rock

When you're recording off TV, then encoding to full DVD quality is rather pointless anyway. Dial the quality down to half that, which is plenty enough for the task. That'll cut encoding times dramatically - as your venture into extremely-low-quality VCD format has demonstrated.

Letting the TV card make a precompressed recording saves the CPU from doing that, but also binds you to compression algorithm and quality settings this particular hardware has builtin. Nonetheless, this too might be perfectly good enough for recordings off TV or VCR.