TMPGEnc taking up to 24 hours to encode

[jagabo]

I've used TMPGEnc on four Intel based systems and once drew a rough graph of encoding time vs processor speed - it's pretty much a straight line. My P4 2.23 is just over 3x faster than my P3 700, and my P4 2.8 is approximately 4x faster.

Hence, I'm not itching to build a new PC with a fast chip since the difference over my P4 2.8 won't be worth the £.

You might consider a dual core processor. I have an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and a 2.8 GHz P4. Without TMPGEnc's multithreaded option the 3800+ encodes at about the same speed as the P4. With multithreading enabled it's nearly twice as fast.

[aedipuss]

check your hard drive settings. device manager/ide. drive 0 and 1(if you have) should be at least ultra dma 3. if it says something like dual fifo the drivers aren't installed.

[superba]

Hi,

I've been playing with TMPGEnc, TG, for several years and have been put off by it's lack of speed.

A few days ago I downloaded "Configuring TMPGEnc for high-quality, DVD-compliant MPEG-2" and followed its instructions using TG Xpress v3.x. I used "Quest for Fire.avi" and TG started reporting 45 to 50 HOURS to do the encode. After 45 - 60 minutes I aborted.

The system I used is an ECS 825G with an AMD Sempron 2600+, 1 GB RAM, Ultra DMA 120 GB hard drive with plenty of space. No other sessions were running. OS is XP Pro with SP2+++.

I won't bore you with the TG settings since they are given in the article I quoted above.

Would someone who can encode in real time with good enough, acceptable quality please post their settings or refer me to an article that gives them.

I'm not looking for an Academy Award for DVD generation, just to be able to watch some stuff on TV.

TIA.

[jagabo]

Reduce Motion Precision from "Highest Quality" to "Motion Esitmate Search" or "Low Quality". There will be very little difference in picture quality and it will be 3x to 4x faster.

If you don't care about the exact file size, switch to Constant Quality encoding. This will give you another 2 fold increase in speed.

A dual core processer will encode nearly twice as fast as a single core processor. But that's a hardware upgrade.

[FulciLives]

CCE Basic is about the same price as TMPGEnc Plus

My suggestion is to buy CCE Basic and use that instead of TMPGEnc Plus.

The quality is very nearly the same (some say slightly better some say slightly worse ... it's all in the eye of the beholder) but the speed increase is amazing.

TMPGEnc Plus is really a "newbie" MPEG encoder.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[akrako1]

here's a general way to speed up nearly any encoding/converting you are doing.... assuming you don't want to do anything else on your computer at the time...

It's all about the Windows Task Manager.
Right click on your taskbar, select 'task manger' (if that doesn't work, press ctrl-alt-del and choose task manager).

Click on the 'processes' tab. Click the 'CPU' word once or twice (so that the highest usage process is at the top). It should hopefully be your encoding process (tmpgenc, etc). Look at how much of the CPU it is using. If it's using anything less then 95-99% - then you can do better!!

Right-click on your process, and choose 'high'. Ok thru the confirmation. Your process should now have a higher priority then all your other system processes (anti-virus, ad watching, system tasks, etc), and should jump up to 99% of CPU usage. Everything else will be dog-slow on your system until you fix the priorities, but if you're leaving your computer unattended to encode/convert - this is the way to go!

[Namrepus221]

CCE Basic is about the same price as TMPGEnc Plus

My suggestion is to buy CCE Basic and use that instead of TMPGEnc Plus.

The quality is very nearly the same (some say slightly better some say slightly worse ... it's all in the eye of the beholder) but the speed increase is amazing.

TMPGEnc Plus is really a "newbie" MPEG encoder.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

It might be a "newbie" converter. But atleast I don't have to learn another program to be able to use it properly.

Frankly I'll put up with the 24 hour encodes instead of learning AVISynth just so I can learn to use CCE.

[Legendsk]

I used to have about the same system.. Athlon 1.2 1GB RAM and was seeing times like those.
I upgraded to P4 3.0GHz 800FSB and installed a couple of SCSI drives. Now for a 1 hour .avi TMPGEnc usually forecasts about 20 minute but actually completes in about 10-12 minutes. This is with the same TMPGEnc settings I was using before. It used to push the utilization to 100% in Task Manger and now generally runs 15 - 20%.
My impression was that the much faster drives probably helped about as much as the faster dual threaded CPU. But I really didn't make a series of formal tests with both - sorry.

Be sure that your working drive is set for DMA, that will certainly have a big impact.

[whitejremiah]

you thought about using quenc? or SUPER? both are fairly easy to use and run a LOT faster than tmpgenc.....

[smearbrick1]

CCE Basic is about the same price as TMPGEnc Plus

My suggestion is to buy CCE Basic and use that instead of TMPGEnc Plus.

The quality is very nearly the same (some say slightly better some say slightly worse ... it's all in the eye of the beholder) but the speed increase is amazing.

TMPGEnc Plus is really a "newbie" MPEG encoder.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

It might be a "newbie" converter. But atleast I don't have to learn another program to be able to use it properly.

Frankly I'll put up with the 24 hour encodes instead of learning AVISynth just so I can learn to use CCE.

If you bump TMPGENC up in processor priority (as someone already mentioned) you should see an decrease in processing time.

That may be your problem. Your PC maybe automatically kicking TMPGENC to a low priority process.

[pchan]

Another thing you can do is to look at your device manager and see if your IDE channel is set to "DMA if any". Defrag your hard disk and make sure you have planty hard disk space.

[FulciLives]

CCE Basic is about the same price as TMPGEnc Plus

My suggestion is to buy CCE Basic and use that instead of TMPGEnc Plus.

The quality is very nearly the same (some say slightly better some say slightly worse ... it's all in the eye of the beholder) but the speed increase is amazing.

TMPGEnc Plus is really a "newbie" MPEG encoder.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

It might be a "newbie" converter. But atleast I don't have to learn another program to be able to use it properly.

Frankly I'll put up with the 24 hour encodes instead of learning AVISynth just so I can learn to use CCE.

There really is very little you need to know about AviSynth to work it. In most instance your "script" is all of 2 lines long. One line to "load" the video and one line to "resize" the video. You can even use the freeware program FitCD for doing this for you.

Granted you can do a lot with AviSynth which I guess makes it more difficult to use but for the basics there really is very little to it and anyone not wanting to use it due to difficulty level is selling themselves short in the brain department.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman