How Long Should MPEG Encoding Take

[hmsrolst]

I recently set up a machine to burn some of my son's VHS tapes to DVD. The basic machine is an ASUS P4B533 with a P4 2.0A overclocked to 3.0 and 512MB of RAM running at DDR400 (4:3), so it's reasonably fast. I captured a half-hour of tape in AVI format at "better quality." It took about an hour and 15 minutes to encode it to MPEG. Is that a reasonable amount of time for a machine like that? (The CPU usage was at 100% the whole time.) Thanks.

 

[oldfart]

Hi Howard,

The time it takes to encode MPEG varies quite a bit depending on the program, and method used. You said it was for DVD, so I assume you encoded to 720 x 480 MPEG2? There are different ways to encode. You can use CBR, and different methods os VBR. Using a 2 pass VBR at high quality will take at least twice as long as a CBR encode. What program are you using, and what are the settings?

 

[BlueWeasel]

Just to give you a reference point, I capture the show Futurama nightly to uncompressed AVI. The length of each show is approximately 22mins after removing commericials, etc.

I use TMPGenc to encode the AVI to MPEG, and it takes roughly a hour and 20 minutes for the conversion. This is with a Epox 8RDA, XP 2000+ (not overclocked), 1024mb PC2100, and WinXP.

 

[NickE]

It depends on what software you use as well as processor speed. On my system (Athlon XP 2400+, 1.5GB PC3200 RAM), using the MainConcept MPEG Exporter in Premiere 6.5 - exporting PAL DVD-compliant MPEG2 on a simple clip i.e. no transitions or other processing, is slightly faster than realtime, so 30 minutes would export in around 22-25 minutes depending on content. MPEG1 for VCD etc. runs at about double realtime.

 

[hmsrolst]

I'm using Studio Version 8 which is the software that comes with a Pinnacle AV Capture Card. I encoded to 720 x 480 MPEG2. There were no other options I can find in the software such as CBR or VBR. Thanks for the responses.

 

[oldfart]

I also use Studio 8 (nice program) to do DVD encoding. Your encoding time of 2.5 x video lenght looks pretty good. You can change some settings. You can pick a quality level (bitrate) or use automatic. You an also use MPEG audio as an option. Studio 8 is only CBR, but that is fine for DVD. VBR is useful for SVCDs.

 

[hmsrolst]

As always, thanks, Scott.