new athlon encoding

[Wiseblood]

I just put together a new system: athlon xp 1900+, asus a7v333, 512mb ddr, maxtor 80gig 7200rpm and my encoding times don't seem to of improved a whole lot from my older system. this is what I'm doing on a 139 minute avi file from dvd 2 svcd...

frameserving(480x480 bicubic resize) from virtualdub to CCE

CCE-4 pass vbr, min-1800 max-2496 avg-2000 (encoding just video, no audio)

aspect ratio - 16:9 progressive frames

image quality priority - 10

anti-noise filter - 6

Doing all this it takes me 5 hours to create the .vaf file then 20 hours to do the actual encoding to mpv. everytime I checked the speeds were at 2.0mbps. Does this sound normal or too low to anyone?

[Craig Tucker]

My pc spec is fairly similar to yours. (see computer details) I cant really comment on the procedures you use, as I don't use cce. However I use TMPGEnc and my encoding times are as follows.

For a standard VCD for a 100 min film with no filters encoding time ranges from 2-4 hours.

However if I enable high quality noise reduction filter this time shoots up to about 20 hours.

Craig

[Nelson37]

That is WAY too slow for that system running CCE. Each pass should be faster than real-time for a frameserved AVI. Noise reduction pays a heavy speed price and CCE's ain't that great, you're still too slow but you probably don't need it, try turning it off.

Check your system with a standard benchmark test, check processor and mem speed settings in BIOS - this seems to get a lot of folks.

Min of 1800 is very high, 500 more common. I have seen it suggested that the difference between min or max and avg should be at least 500.

[Wiseblood]

I ran a benchmark on pcmark2002 and got the following,

cpu - 4786

memory - 3558

hdd - 811

seems pretty good to me, the only problem I noticed was 3dmark2002 lists my processor as running at 1.56ghz and I'm running a athlon 1900 so...

[pet_head]

The clock speed of 1.56 ghz is correct for an Athlon 1900+. The speed printed on the chip does not match its true clock speed. This is merely a marketing ploy by the people at AMD to associate their chips with equivalent Pentium IV speeds. Before you get upset, this is not a bad thing. Most computer consumers are not savvy enough to know that an Athlon running at a slower speed is actually equivalent to higher clocked Pentium IV.

Comparing clock speeds between processor types is like comparing apples and oranges - they just are not equivalent. AMD chose to brand their chips with numbers that make consumers more comfortable with their purchase. The numbers that AMD has been using are actually pretty conservative. The 1900 your chip is stamped with actually does a bit better than a P IV 1900 on most tests.

Still don't know why your having such a slow encode though, my Athlon 1.4 Ghz Thunderbird (which does not have SEE instructions) regularly reaches encoding speeds of 1.4X real time using Avisynth and CCE.

[Gabriel]

This sounds like exactly what happened to me last week. I reinstalled TMPGEnc and all my speeds changed to what they should be. Give it a shot, you don't have anything to lose.

[Wiseblood]

"The clock speed of 1.56 ghz is correct for an Athlon 1900+. The speed printed on the chip does not match its true clock speed. This is merely a marketing ploy by the people at AMD to associate their chips with equivalent Pentium IV speeds. Before you get upset, this is not a bad thing. Most computer consumers are not savvy enough to know that an Athlon running at a slower speed is actually equivalent to higher clocked Pentium IV."


I know a 1900 dosen't mean 1.9ghz, what I meant was the 1900+ is supposed to run at 1.6 and the tests kept giving speeds comparable to a 1800. You think frameserving with virtualdub might be the problem?

[gf]

Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz)
Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz)
Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz)
Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz)

Hope this helps.

[malducci]

The problem is VirtualDub. I love this program, but it is slow for frame serving. I recommend avisynth, and set CCE anti-noise filter to 2 or 3 ( anything above will not give better results ). I still use VirtualDub for some captured videos since it has the best filters for noise removal and such - also the speed of virtualdub's frame serving is also dependent on the number of filters your using with it. BTW, I set my image quality to 35 to 40 unless I'm doing music videos and I'm anal about artifacts in my video. Oh and I don't use anti-noise filters for DVD video to SVCD( not much need to and its slower ). Here are my system specs:

AMD 1800+
256meg 266 DDR
MSI K7 master
AMD northbridge and VIA south bridge chipset
6x DVD-rom
2x 40gig 7200rpm ata100 hard drives

With DVD2SVCD I usually encode 1.5x to 1.8x of the original movie time. Also, if you use temporal(SP?) smoothing - this will have a big effect on the encoding speed. In short, use AVISYNTH with DVD2SVCD.

Piece of advice: I used to use 4pass VBR, but there has been some dicussion as CCE sometimes stretches the bitrate too thin in some areas of the video with using it for SVCD's - CCE was not designed for SVCD but DVD with 5mb bitrate and higher. I have tested it and seen this, but most wont - again I'm anal about my video. The point is don't use more than 3pass VBR. I still use CBR @ 2400 on some videos hehe

[Nelson37]

I forgot to ask - Are you setting DIRECT STREAM COPY in Vdub? If using no VDUB filters, DEFINITELY turn this on! In both Video and Audio settings.
Does the Benchmark program give system comparisons? I'm not familiar with that prog, the raw numbers don't tell me anything, although I have often seen benchmarks slightly off on MHZ numbers.

[Akai Rounin]

MPEG1 for SPEED

[IMHO]Strange, you should be just singing along... That sounds WAY too slow for a 1900+ system. What are you encoding, the ROOTS miniseries?

Why not try this method instead?

0) SMARTRIPPER
1) DVD2AVI
2) TMPGENC
3) VCDEASY

It works fine on my Brother's AMD Athlon XP 1500+ system... 512 MB DDR, 120 GB storage, 64 MB video, etc ... Of course, I don't do SVCD either - but methinks a sub 2500 kilobit per second video bitrate would be fine as CBR with MPEG1 instead. MPEG2 really shows off its advantages at bitrates in excess of 3000 kilobits per second.[/IMHO]

HUN-YA!

Akai Rounin