Handbrake low CPU usage

[moonbogg]

OK, so I am a total noob at using handbrake or doing any video work. I recorded a BF3 game with fraps, brought the file in handbrake and clicked "start". CPU is being used like 30-40%. Is this normal?? Would be nice to have it just blast through it at 100%.

Its a 100gb file and has been going about 5 minutes or so and is 30% done.

 

[ViRGE]

Not all steps of the encoding process perfectly scale with multiple cores. If you're doing multipass encoding in particular, the first pass is largely single-threaded.

 

[Pilum]

Do you ue any filters? Some of those can use only a few threads, thus limiting the encode speed. Handbrake generally used ~95% CPU on my old Q9550, but when transcoding interlaced sources with the Comb filter, CPU usage dropped to ~65%, because Comb can only use 2 cores. I suppose that other filters may have similar impact.

 

[LoveMachine]

Is it bouncing between usage? e.g. 99% then 35% then back to 99? I had an issue with a failing hard drive that couldn't feed data to Handbrake fast enough and I had the above story happen. It would briefly pop to 99 for a second or two, but usually ran around 40%. A new drive (even a slowish Greeny) brought utilization back up to 99% steady.

 

[moonbogg]

There is no spike in usage. It floats around 25-35% or so. I'll have to do research and check settings I guess. Either way it took 30 minutes to encode a 100gb file. I don't know if thats good or bad but I can tolerate it I suppose until I get more educated. Oh, then the file wouldn't play in WM player. Hmm. It was using H.264 I believe.
I love it when people accuse me of hacking all the time in BF3. All I gotta say now is, "watch the video later, punk".

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

There is a CPU priority setting in there. I can't recall the exact words but just set it to high priority and it should use more of the CPU.