unusual tmpg long encode time

[john111]

o.k...usually it takes tmpg about 6-8 hours to encode a regular size movie. but lately tmpg starts to encode and it tells me that its going to take 127 hours or so for the whole movie. NOW, sometimes tmpg will say 127 hours but would still finish the job within 6-8 hours. This is Different. it would actually take 127 hours to encode the whole thing (i left the encoding on for a about 12 hours or so and it was still in the opening credits part of the movie). This phenomina happens primarily with only certain smr encoded files...
the encoding time varies from file to file but these unusually long files range between 30 hours to about 130 hours...when it should take about 6-8 hours.
at first i thought it had something to do with the codec so i unintalled the angel potion one and put it another kind. (took off the purple haze but didn't fix the problem)
is there something that i need to change in the settings like the enviromental settings, vfapi priority or something like that....
what am i missing....like i said this happens with only a few smr encoded files, there are others who work just fine...
any ideas out there.

[Faustus]

hrm... I had CCE tell me that an encode that should take 3 hours at most would take 7, then I defrag and all was better.

[john111]

you mean you defraged your hard drive and it made a difference?

[Faustus]

After backing up a ton of DVDs my drive was quite fragmented, the defrag took over 2 hours (160gb of space) the first pass and about an hour for a second pass. (NTFS in WinXP I always suggest defragging twice) Afterwards my encode speeds were way up again. It might not be the answer to your problem but its worth a try.