TMPGEnc 2.58 compressing times.

[ima2hd]

I have spent a week trying to make a a SVCD using CCE. Time and time again it would not work, I was about to give up on making a svcd. After writing several messages on the board a forum member told me that cce won't work with the VIA chipesets running AMD Processors. And that is exactly what I have! So thanks to this forum member. I was able to finally produce a a svcd using TMPGEnc 2.58 the quality was awesome, however it was just a small 5 minute chapter from Mad Max. Now I am trying to do a whole movie 117min. (Blade 2); however it is Excruciatingly Slow. Currently 9hrs & 19min. have elapsed with TMPGenc and it sais I still have 16hrs & 17 min. to go. I have fiddled with the task priority settings, but they seem to make little difference. I have followed the settings given by digital-digest and Doom. I just can't see a 2hr movie taking over 24hrs. There most be something seriously wrong with my computer. Maybe i should switch over to a pentium 4 with a new motherboard. Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated. Thanks in Advance.Will

[Ron Cahill]

A 12-1 ratio in rendering time is not unusual for a lower powered computer. In fact, some people may say that you're lucky.
The experts say that a Pentium 4 with 1 GIG of Ram is the optimum for video rendering.
But we are not all millionaires.

[ima2hd]

I am using 1 Gig of Ram. And i have a very fast processor ..AMD Athalon thunderbird with a VIA chipset. So it must not be working at full capacity? Cheers Will

[theboywonder]

Ram doesnt matter much when processing video / converting to mpg.
The process involves short instructions executed by the processor, hence the speed of conversion is heavily dependent on your CPU speed. Aslong as you've got 256mb, having more won't really affect the encoding time.

Also, task priority doesnt influence the actual speed of conversion.

What Ghz is your AMD?

A tip for SVCD with TMPGEnc:-

1) Click setting to modify the properties of the SVCD template.
You want "Motion search precision" (at the bottom) set to "High quality (slow)". Some people argue that "Motion estimate search (fast)" is better overall, since it is quite a bit quicker, but I think it yields results noticably poorer than when set to High. Highest really does take too long (about 40% longer than High with very little difference).

Another question: Are you using the 2 PASS (VBR) setting?

This effectively doubles your encoding time. Using TMPGenc 2.56 under Option > Environmental Setting > CPU you can tick a box under 'Cache setting' which saves the analysing results of pass 1 to the cache. In my experience this speeds up a 2 PASS encoding by upto 35%.

________________________

I've just done an encode:

2 PASS with motion search set to HIGH using a 45 minute file into CVD (smaller resolution than SVCD so a bit quicker).

1.2 Ghz AMD Duron (128mb just so you know!).

With the option mentioned above ticked. It took about 6.2 hrs.

6.2 x (117 / 45) = 16.2 hrs predicted for conversion of your 117 minute movie into CVD with 2 PASS option...... on my system. I would expect SVCD to be about 20-21 hrs.

I'm assuming yours should be faster than that! I usually do the movie in 2 parts anyway. 1 part per night!

Let me know how you get on.....[/b]

[ima2hd]

theboywonder: Thanks for the info.! I also have 1.2Ghz. I have it set on "high quality (slow)" & 2 pass (vbr). I have not tried TMPGEnc 2.56. I may want to do that since it would save me 35%. As I speak it has went through 50% of the process in about 12 hrs! It is going for it's second pass, but I want the best quality so I assume I should leave this setting alone. theboywonder have you tried using CCE? According to Doom and others on the forum it is better and possibly faster than TMPGEnc.Is there anyway for us AMD users with a via chipset to use cce? My computer has been acting a bit funny as of late & although I'm not rich I was thinking about having the motherboard changed out and a Pentium 4 put in,however my friend informs me I can't do that with the amount of memory I have on my computer.IN your opinion How much faster would the conversation process be if I changed over to a Pentium 4? Best Regards, Will

[theboywonder]

Sorry,

Having never used a P4 I wouldnt know if there are any benefits. Perhaps you should post something along the lines of "P4 vs AMD on encoding" .... in the appropraite forum.

That should cause a stir! (there are probably already discussions on this)

I've only installed CCE... never actually used it. Yes you are correct - it is meant to be better and much quicker for MPEG-2 (svcd). I gave up because I haven't been bothered to figure out how to work it - TMPGenc is so easy

Plus I've got another comp right now so all that is doing now is processing video hehe... I can use this one for all my normal needs (surfing / downloading etc).

Oh, and if you want 2.56 just email me. Its not available on the website.
robin@theboywonder.co.uk

[LeeBear]

ima2hd: MPEG2 encoding with TMPG is excruciatingly slow, CCE is light years quicker... okay maybe not but I'd say 4 times quicker on average I do 4-pass VBR SVCD's using CCE takes about 7 hours.... this is on a Athlon XP 1700+.

CCE definitely does work with Athlon processors and VIA chipsets. If you haven't done so already I suggest you goto www.doom9.org and read the CCE FAQ in the forum section. They have some questions and solutions to various types of CCE crashes. Also you never mentioned what version of CCE you are using. If it's 2.62, do me a favour and try to encode something using CBR and see if it crashes. If it doesn't all I can say is I'm reporting you to the BSA

-LeeBear

[theboywonder]

how long a movie is that LeeBear ... you have tempted me hehe....

[EnemyWithin]

My dual AMD MP 2100's get around 1.8 speed in CCE. So a typical 2 hour movie will take just over an hour for each pass. So basically, I can do a 2 hr DVD->DVD-R 2-pass VBR transcode in under 2.5 hours.

This is using DVD2AVI v1.77.3->Avisynth v2.05->CCE v2.50.

Dualie's are awesome

[ima2hd]

Ok guys here is the thing I want to use cce however when I use my dvd2svcd prgram and it gets to cce part it sais " read end of file". I don't know why it sais this I have asked but no one seems to know; however I am using a AMD thunderbird processor with a VIA chipset I understand that it will not work with this. I can only use TMPGEnc. If you guys or girls know a solution for my problem it would greatly be appreciated. At this point I don't think it is realistic for me to be making any svcd's. At 25hrs to make one hour movie it is just to long. I can see mayb 8 hrs or so but not 25hrs. Thanks All..Will

[ima2hd]

oops correction i meant to say a 2hr movie in 25hrs. Does anyone know of another version of cce I can use with my AMD..VIA chipset? Will

[Chemcat]

What version of CCE are you using? The best version for DVD2SVCD is 2.50 because it was the last one able to accept frameserving from Avisynth. Newer versions can be made to work but they're much slower because they have to go through an additional wrapper. Make sure under the encoding tab that you have CCE checked on the radio tab and that you have browsed to .exe file to show DVD2SVCD where it is. It sounds to me like DVD2SVCD isn't finding the .exe file. The only thing about AMD cpus and CCE having problems that I know about is that you have to have a reference to an audio file (even though you're not having CCE do the audio). All you have to do is check the box "Add Resample Audio" in the frameserving tab and it will add the filter to the Avisynth file. It doesn't slow down the encoding process. All that said, TMPGenc shouldn't be as slow as it is with the pc that you have.

[ima2hd]

Chemcat. thanks for the info. Where can i get this version of cce the 2.50 you mentioned. Is it available from their web-site? I was trying to use the new version. it seems that when i downloaded dvd2svcd it downloaded the trial version of cce and already had it in the file box and it was set as that on default. But I better re-do this again to make sure. Yes I have what I thought was a pretty fast computer, but this is the first time since i have actually used the cpu's power and it seems to be failing miserably. Thanks Will

[banjazzer]

I wouldn't give up on TMPG, but I would try CQ mode with max bitrate=2520, min bitrate=300, enable padding ticked, motion search precision=high, and a quality setting between 75 and 85. This takes half the time of 2-pass VBR. Filesize will be unpredictable, but the quality won't.

If you are looking for CCE 2.50, try a search on Google for Apachez website. It should be there.

[LeeBear]

ima2hd: you're using a thunderbird CPU right? I don't think CCE 2.5 works with that CPU, you need to use version 2.62 or higher and in DVD2SVCD you can change the path of where the encoder is to point to different version of CCE if you have multiple versions on your computer. Just remember to click "safe mode (frame serving)" if using CCE other then 2.5. It's slows encoding down a bit, but it should still be faster then 25 hours.

-LeeBear

[theboywonder]

hes tried it and it worked for him. cce obviously does work with thunderbird cpu's .......

works with my 550 athlon aswell........

[energy80s]

I would also recommend CQ settings in TMPGenc. I use them a lot, would never dream of 2 pass VBR as it takes too long and the qulaity isn't really that different. If I want the best possible quality I use CBR ... fast and as good as you will ever get for any given bitrate, although file sizes will suffer. If you use a CQ setting of 80 and file bitrates of 2496 max and 600 min (with padding) and 224kbps audio will give you around 50 minutes of SVCD/CVD MPEG2 on a 700Mb CD-R disc and will play on any DVD player capable of playing SVCD's.

[banjazzer]

I would also recommend CQ settings in TMPGenc. I use them a lot, would never dream of 2 pass VBR as it takes too long and the qulaity isn't really that different.

Some think the quality with CQ is better, and this does seem to be implied by TMPG's helpfile. 8)