5hours 30mins to convert a 115 meg AVI to Mpeg1, is this ..

[MarkJ]

normal using TMPGEnc on a AMD K6 400mhz machine with 256 meg of memory?

[Gravity]

How long is the movie? It takes me 9 hours to do 90 minutes, about 12 to do 120 minutes on a 466, 160mbs ram. And the original file sizes doesnt really matter with time.

[MarkJ]

47 Mins (half of a film) so your rule of thumb is there or there abouts, just thought I was doing something wrong or my old machine was holding it up. Is this the amount of time it takes everyone, surely there must be a quicker way?

[man_friday]

a faster CPU is the key to encoding speed but you'll need at least 256MB an a generally healthy system. Plenty o other factors to consider too but
TBird 1100
512MB SDRAM
ABIT KT7E
TMPGENC 254+
etc...
runs about 2.5hrs for 600MB avi -> VCD

[BananaSkin]

Also depends on the quality setting for the encoding in TMPGEnc...

Higher Quality = Slower Encoding -> Better end result..

But you have to use your own judgement to balance quality vs speed. The question to ask yourself is 'how good is the .avi file quality?' and is higher quality encoding worth the extra effort.

Hazarding a guess i'd say most .avi files you should only encode at normal (occasionally you'll find a really good .avi so use high).

DVD ripping and encoding is another matter...for these go for highest quality...it shows 8)

BananaSkin

[MarkJ]

thanks for the replies guys ill bare the quality issue in mind when I next encode and I am also looking at a faster system because I have other problems relating around the system