Faster reencode of VOBs

[zdvd]

What are my best options for reencoding of VOBs that won't take freakin forever and will preserve the 5.1 soundtrack? Nothing less than say, 30fps on my machine (Athlon 64 3000+ w/2GB RAM) is doable with the amount of video I have to encode.

So far I've tried Nero Recode Digital (AVC 1 and 2 pass), AGK, and DivX Pro and they are all unbelievably slow on my system. Like 5fps slow. DivX Pro was the fastest of the bunch, and probably would've taken about 4 or 5 hours to do a single feature. The rest were in the 10+ range. AGK didn't even seem to get through 1gb of VOB in 7 hours so I killed it.

Does the bitrate affect the time to encode or not? Is a higher bitrate faster to encode (because it's closer to the source material?)

I've also tried just compressing the VOBs with Nero Recode and that is very fast... but the minimum bitrate is also very high... maximum compression is only about 50%. Better than nothing (at least it's really fast) but not much.

Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks.

[guns1inger]

What are you trying to achieve ?

Recode can do one of two things. It can transocde like DVD Shrink, or it can re-encode to another format. I suspect the fast recode was the transcode process. All this does is throw away data from the original mpeg2 video to reduce the space (bitrate), which is why you can only go down so far. It is fast, but the quality would likely be pretty low.

The other tools seem to suggest you are really heading towards some form of mpeg4 compression in an avi container. Using virtualdubmod and Divx Pro 6.2.2 on a HT P4 3Ghz I get around 30 - 40 fps while doing a moderate resize in the encoder (not using vdub filters).

I suspect the problem may lie, at least in part, with your system.