Fragmented HD slow down encodes?

[Blazey]

My encodes have been cooking at near 1X speed, but all of a sudden they are 4X slower. I'm running a defrag, but I'm curious if anyone elase has had this problem or might it be something deeper like a bad memory chip.

[GeorgeW]

hmmm, could be hardware related.

I know I've made changes to motion-search settings trying to tweak my encoder which causes it to take longer. Did you happen to make any changes to templates or settings? What encoder? Are all other things still equal (source video type, no new hardware or software, etc...)?

[Blazey]

No changes whatsoever. No filters same file.

[honorarybrutha]

xp sp2 recently?

[State Of Mind]

If its your fragmentation level, please use PerfectDisk. it is the best defragmenter and there is a PDF file on the right side of the homepage that proves it.

[mats.hogberg]

I seriously doubt disc fragmentation would affect encoding time at all, much less quadruple it. The problem must be something else. AFAIK, encoding time is linear to processor speed.

/Mats

[SatStorm]

Disc Fragmentation could slow down sligthy older, PATA HDs.
I wouldn't say that this is possible with latest Serial ATA or ATA 133 HDs

Check if DMA is still on...

[SaSi]

What is the source video format you are encoding from? For example, if it is AVI and the video is encoded in, say, DivX, did you update your DivX codec recently? Did you change the DivX codec settings recently? Have you tried encoding a different format AVI - like hufyuv?

A lot of processing time goes into decoding the source AVI file before the actual encoding can happen.

I have noticed that DivX 5.2 AVI files encoded with high motion search compression (bidirectional search and stuff) are slower to process compared to "old-fashioned" DivX 5.1 AVI.

Just a thought.