New mencoder and ffmpeg binaries faster encoding XviD?

[adamantius]

The latest documentation for ffmpegX seems to suggest it, but I'm not seeing it in practice. Using older versions of mencoder (I haven't used ffmpeg much because of NTSC sound sync issues, even though I gather these issues have been largely solved), I'd get a typical close-to-two-hours of video file transcoded from, say, a DivX .avi at a higher bitrate and size than I want, or three separate SVCD mpeg-2 files, to a single DivX or XviD .avi that will fit on a single disk, and that would generally take eight hours or less on my old PowerMac 8600 with a Sonnet Crescendo 800 mhz upgrade. I could do it in even less time by renicing ffmpegX to give it greater processor priority.

Still, eight hours is eight hours, and I generally used mencoder for this. When I read the other day, "Updated mencoder and ffmpeg engines to to latest XviD 1.1 branch (about twice as faster than in version 0.0.9p)", I thought it would be a good time to revisit XviD as an option, but I'm finding that in my case, it's slower, both in mencoder and ffmpeg engine usage. I've been using the XviD presets. Yesterday it took about sixteen hours to transcode a 1.36 GB file containing about 100 minutes of video into a 700MB .avi file using the ffmpeg engine.

Does anyone have a useful suggestion, or am I doing something obviously wrong, or has anyone else reported a similar drop in speed?

Many thanks for any info!

Phil

[WiseWeasel]

I think the update adds Altivec/VMX optimizations, so you might not see improvements with a G3 processor...

[adamantius]

I'm sorry; I was probably unclear. It's a G4 processor running at 800 Mhz, L2 cache running at 800 Mhz, and L3 running at 229 Mhz (in other words, slightly overclocked).

Thanks!