TMPGenc DVD Author

[northcat_8]

Just something I noticed last night...

I convert my DV-AVI files with TMPGenc Plus 2.5.

I am authoring a DVD with TDA.

I have 3 tracks, one is a first play track, and 3 menus, one a motion menu.

The DVD is 3.3 GB and took 47 minutes to author.

My question is that while it was authoring I had task manager open and while writing the menu's the CPU (P4 2.666) ran at 100% but when writing the tracks the CPU ran between 16-21% is that normal?

I am thinking that the CPU should run at 100% or close to it, all the time and should have taken less than 47 minutes.

[jtoolman2000]

The tracks are already MPG2 so it basically just recreated them to DVD file structure without much work. The menus it had to create and create the motion menu so that's when the cpu would have to do some work. Just a theory and I could be wrong.
40+ minutes is about right. Maybe a little slow but not out of the question

[navatweb]

when it writes the track, the dvd burner is being used, and not much CPU work needs to be done.

[thor300]

The DVD burner is not yet involved at that point.
I have noticed this too and concluded that TDA reads and writes way too small blocks, thereby flooding the harddisk with lots of small operations, so the CPU power is used by the OS thread for the harddrive instead of TDA itself. Also, the harddisk is the bottleneck in this case so the CPU can relax.

[johns0]

Something is wrong there,should be close 100% cpu usuage and it only takes me an average of 11 minutes to author a 4.35 gb project.

[jtommyj]

Some times the length of the motion menus can be a variable,whether you are reading and writing to the same hard disc can be a variable.

I have a Dual Xeon 3.06 which is really = to single since the TDA isn't SMP capable and i have had it take that long doing motion menus with maximum length and that is reading from one HDD and writing to another.

So it is a "little" on the long side but possibly the CPU was slowing down because the disc I/O was the bottleneck,and not the CPU.

Tom

[thor300]

You can not have close to 100% cpu use on disk intensive applications unless you have fat hardware raids or SAS systems or something else that requires you to sell your body to afford. The process will not report the cpu time that is being used for the read/write of the disk since that is a OS process. You see the almost the same in programs like imgtools classic (mkisofs), just that they read and write more reasonable sized chunks than TDA and does less processing. Bad example maybe, but close enough. =)

[northcat_8]

You can not have close to 100% cpu use on disk intensive applications

AHHH...that makes sense.

My main menu, the motion menu is huge. The thumbs are static, and the other 3 menus are static with static thumbs.

BUT...TDA needs to convert them to DVD compliant, where as with the video sections...the video is already m2v DVD compliant and TDA just needs to put it together. So when encoding the menus, the program is working hard to convert and not much to effort is spent writing to disc and thus requires major CPU, when authoring the video parts, most energy is spent simply writing to disc since the files are already compliant

Thanks. I knew I was missing something.

I wondered because DVDWS pegs 100% on the CPU the whole time...but then again, DVDWS doesn't always get compliant files and this needs to encode the video files.