video encoding is slow...

[Build it Myself]

I figured I'd spend the day making backups of my DVD's since there was a huge clearance at Staples (50 Sony DVD+R's for $12) and I've got CDburnerXP running, DVDfabEncrypter running, and two DVDshrink programs encoding at the same time...all in all the cores don't put anything more than 45% into it (i'm at 20% and 25% right now) and my memory is only at 48% usage...but the encoding is taking FOREVER!! LOL, the rate is 2800kb/s for one of them and 3300kb/s for the other and my DVD's are taking almost 20minutes a piece to record on 18x. They will run much faster if I use them independently but I wanted to know why they're not running faster if my computer is bored doing all this...

Is this normal or can I speed it up somehow?

 

[imported_nightfox]

Is this all on one hard drive? Maybe that is why it's so slow.

 

[Build it Myself]

yeah it's one HD but it's a WD 250 with 16mb buffer or what have you, I thought it'd run better than this...kind of disapointed

 

[Soundmanred]

If you've got more than one thing reading/writing to your HD, it will slow down everything.
I do one thing at a time, get it done, and move on to the next. I've found it's faster to do this. It's not your processor speed or RAM that's slowing you down.
If you want to see what I mean, start copying (not cut and paste) a large file from one part of your HD to another, then do another one while the first one is transferring. Your transfer speeds will drop dramatically and it will take forever to move two files. If you do one at a time, it will take no time at all, but writing to two different parts of your HD really slows things down. This is essentially what you're doing by "multitasking" all the stuff you had listed. Add to that your DVD burner trying to read from the HD as well, and you're really bogging down your HD.
Burning a DVD taking 20 minutes? That's about 4x-5x.
Edit: it's actually about 3x at around 4MB/Sec.

 

[Mango1970]

I can prove it to you. I have 3 WD SATA 500GB drives. One has my OS and apps... and the other 2, one is used to house the video file I have in whatever format and the other is used to be the target drive of whatever the end result will be. I can almost (in most cases) cut the encoding decoding time by almost 50% when I go from one drive to the other. Same with using WinRar -- If I take an ISO that is now in say 90 parts like 40 Megs each and using winrar I turn it back into its full ISO format, if I go from one hardrive to the other it's less than half the time if I was just raring it to the same drive and folder.

 

[Idontcare]

Multi-tasking your traditional harddisk (platter/spindle) is the quickest way to experience 1995 system-level performance. Multi-tasking is gated by latency and not so much by bandwidth.

That ~10ms latency time is 10,000's of times slower than the rest of your computer. (1 millisecond = 1,000 microseconds = 1,000,000 nanoseconds)

If you want to multi-task a hard-drive then you want to Raid-0 some IRAM drives together or get an SSD (solid-state drive). These drives don't have the mechanical components which are to blame for the inherently piss-poor latency of traditional harddrives.

Note that "Raid"ing hardrives does not reduce latency, it merely amps up the bandwidth.

 

[Soundmanred]

So we all agree then?
I use a seperate drive (or drives) to encode to, burn from, etc. I only use my main drive for OS and programs.

 

[graysky]

It's the software dude. x264 does a much better job. You can download my x264 Benchmark HD and run it on that machine. See how it compares to the other dual systems in the data table. If you do end-up running it, please let me know what the CPU usage was for pass 1 and pass2 and also see the FAQ.