how long should dvd shrink take to encode?? 400 minute dvd..

[kenmasters83]

i am shrinking a 400 minute dual layer dvd and its taking almost 3 hours to do this with the smooth option enabled is this normal or am i doing something wrong??

the dvd has got 20 individual eps each one is at 60% compression..its in 720x480 resolution too if that matters..

here is my system specs.

athlon xp 2000
512mb pc 2700
40 gig 2mb HDD
geforce 2 doesnt really matter..
win2000

what can i do to speed thing up??

[Cinemagic]

You never said what speed processor you have.
Basically,
1) get the fastest processor available,
2) get the fastest motherboard (FSS speed) available,
3) go to at least 1 gig RAM.
4) use fast HDDs (such as SATA or dual striped drives),
5) disable any antivirus software (actually this is number one to do) and other unnecessary processes and services running,
6) make sure that you are using the latest version of the software you are using.

If you did everything listed, you'd be going as fast as possible.

[normcar]

The best and cheapest way to increase the speed would be to get 1 or 2 new drives so you can read from 1 drive and write to the other. To get max speed they should be SATA drives. Also defrag your harddrive.

[guns1inger]

OK - 400 minutes - 6 hours and 4 minutes. A - that's going to suck big time for quality once it gets down to single-layer size, and B that's probably about right for that large a job. A little more memory and some faster drives might shave 30 minutes off that, but I'm not surprised at 3 hours. I run an Athlon XP 1800+ and a deep analysis/AEC run from disk to disk of a 100 minute film will usually take 40-50 minutes or so.

For 400 minutes (I hope that's a typo or you have seeing eye dog) you would be better off letting it run all night through DVD Rebuilder with CCE at half-D1. The quality would be substantially better.

[Ward River]

Ignore the bad advice you're getting about switching to SATA drives. If you've already got them, great...use them. Don't run right out and waste your money on one for this though. The speed increases for doing what you are trying to do here are practically non-existant. Negligible at best. We're talking about shaving a couple of seconds off of a multi-hour task with SATA vs IDE here. The bottleneck is your CPU and front side bus speed. You already have more than enough RAM for this. Increasing your 512mb to 1gb is not going to make a big difference. Spend your money on a motherboard with a faster FSB speed and get the fastest CPU for that board you can afford. Also be sure to check that your EIDE controllers are running in DMA mode and NOT in PIO mode. Regular 5400 & 7200 rpm IDE drives are all you need for this stuff. Anything else is overkill.

[lumis]

it shouldnt take that long.. not long enough to warrant a hardware purchase.

[winifreid]

That is a really long DVD, so it will take a long time to transcode. My computer is nearly as fast as yours and a 2 hour DVD takes about 60 minutes to transcode. I assume you don't have a lot of 400 minute DVDs, so don't worry. You might get a slight speed increase by turrning off any active virus software and such while you transcode. Multitasking will slow it down, as well.

[kenmasters83]

thanks for the tips guys..

i noticed a small speed increase after disabling antivirus i had to enable the smoothness option in dvdshrink and man oh man it added hours to the encodeing process

the final results are excellent though it was worth the wait..

i was thinking of putting an athlon xp 2700 in machine will i notice a huge speed increase or just a small one??

[winifreid]

Transcoding is cpu intensive so there will be a speed increase ruffly equivelent to the increase in processor power. If it is an Athlon and not a sempron, then you might expect as much as a 35% increase. Unless there is another bottleneck which there sholdn't be.

[Ward River]

Jumping your FSB speed from 266 to 333 will give you a pretty noticeable boost in speed and performance.