SUPER v PSPVideo9 v Nero Recode (6, 7) v CloneDVD Mobile v Others -- Speed

[bobogs]

I've tried running the same single 3.7gb VOB through these various apps, to encode to a PSP-friendly format (AVC). They all seem to do the job, but as I saw it, there were some pretty drastic speed differences between the free apps and the paid apps. I'm pretty certain I configured each app with similar bitrates and/or target file sizes and a single pass, but SUPER took much longer to create the mp4 than did Recode 6 and 7. PSPVideo9 took over 4 hours on my 1.7ghz pentium m laptop. The Neros took about 50-65 minutes.

Don't all these apps use some variation of mencoder or ffmpeg? Even CloneDVD Mobile is just a pretty GUI around mencoder, with the corporate dollars available to make it look nice, versus the wonderful coders out there who generously take the time to write the SUPERs and PSPVideo9s of the world, right?

I'm not totally averse to having my transcodes run overnight on these free tools, but there are times when I might want to get a dvd onto the psp or ipod in time for dinner out with the kid, and I have a hard time remembering that four hour lead time.

Thanks!
Gary

PS...I do own a license for Nero 6.x (and Nero Digital 2.2.x), so I could use Recode full-time, but it only has the one PSP profile, and it leaves the audio kind of low in the final mp4.

[celtic_druid]

Nero is using Ateme's encoder. Pretty much everything else is using x264 either via ffmpeg (libavcodec) or mencoder. Exceptions would be Quicktime, Mainconcept, etc. Thing about using ffmpeg is that you are stuck with faac for aac audio which aside from your volume problem (wasn't there a registry fix for that?) is no where near as good a quality aac encoder as Nero's (or Apple's).

I wouldn't have thought that x264 would be much slower than Ateme's encoder though.