Encoding and system memory

[perdomot]

Just wondering if anyone here uses those utilities to free up ram when they are encoding. I've only got 512 MB of ram and TMPEG chews it up like crazy when I'm making my VCDs. Are there any good utilities to use and what should I set the limits to? Thanks.

[bugster]

512Mb should be more than enough for VCD encoding. I encode to DVD with Tmpgenc, which should use more memory, and never hit the 512Mb limit on my PC.

[DJRumpy]

perdomot, as your operating system install gets older, you'll find that many applications install background services that run all the time. These are usually harmless, and more often then not, pointless for day to day work. You should clean these out, uninstall, or disable them. The method depends on which operating system you use. If your using any of the newer NT based systems, you can press Control + Alt + Delete, and select the 'Task Manager' button. Select the 'Processes' tab, and from there you can view exactly how much memory each process uses. The 'Performance' tab will show you exactly how much physical ram is in use, as well as CPU Utilization.

[RabidDog]

tmpgenc itself doesnt use that much memory, between 13meg and 26meg. I run quite happily with 265mb. sure its not your environemt variables -- temp cache -- that needs setting (somewhere between 1 & 4gb of disk space?)

[perdomot]

I'm not exactly sure what to tell you guys. All I do know is that when TMPEG finishes encoding, the system is moving super slow. If I push Start, it takes several seconds for the menu to pop up and normally, its instantaneous. I tried one program a while back that let you see the amount of memory you had in the system tray and as the encoding process progressed, the amount of free memory decreased.

[DJRumpy]

It sounds like a memory leak. What operating system are you using?

[ricky1756]

is your hard drive fragmented? video files are quite large and quickly fragment a hard drive

[SaSi]

When testing the performance and reliability of an encoder, don't forget to take into account the Video codec used for the source AVI file.

The old, divx v.3 and 4 codecs are a mess. They are slow and consume memory a lot. DivX 5 is fine.

Also, another problem is with the OS itself.

Your description about sluggish OS performance after encoding a file, reminds me of the bad-old Win98 days. Even copying large amounts of data caused the same thing.

There is a single reason for this. Windows 98 - I guess this is what you are using - tends to use all memory as disk cache. Reading lot's of disk data, tends to overuse the RAM into a cache that won't empty unless some RAM management tool forces it to be released.

A trick to avoid this, as I recall, is to open System.ini (I think. It might be Win.ini) and find a paragraph named Cache or Virtual memory or something - it's been too long.

There, add the following two lines:
MinFileCache = 8192
MaxFileCache = 65536

Or whatever sizes in Kb you want. This will make Windows use no more than that for Cache. In most cases, this fixes the problem under Windows 98.

Of course, the perfect remedy is to remove this OS and use Win2K or XP.