Why so long??

[ABAB]

I'm just about getting the hang of converting my movies, splitting, ripping and burning them but I've this Q' for you.

I've converted my .avi file to mpg2 to burn as a SVCD with these settings in TMPGenc

Rate control mode....CBR
Motion search precision...High quality
Noise reduction on.

With these settings I can get a good quality copy on 3 or 4 80 min discs which takes about 15 hrs to encode as a batch.
I only have an 800 Mhz processor with 256k RAM.

Is this normal for my set up or am I getting it all wrong??

Thx

[jkl]

that is pretty normal.

[ABAB]

OK, cool.

Least I'm on the right track.....Thx for reply jkl

[ZeroKool]

Abab, JKL is right - it is normal for the PC of those specifications as encoding speed depends on your CPU speed and RAM. I would advise getting a faster PC with more RAM if you want to encode a lot of AVIs to Mpeg. I got 1900 MGHz AMD Athlon with 512 MB RAM and it takes 1.5 - 4 hours to encode AVI to Mpeg. Or try to apply minimum amount of filters if you want it to encode faster. VBR 2-Pass would take twice the time of CBR. Noise reductions also slows encoding quite a lot - try to encode without filters applied and see the difference - if it is OK then go without filters. Motion precision - i always set this on highest too as it makes quite a difference to the quality while does not require much longer encoding (normal 1.5 hours, highest 2 hours for me). But if you are just concerned whether you are doing everything right then disregard this post - it is absolutely normal for TMPGEnc to encode AVI to Mpeg in 15 hours on PC with those specs.

[ABAB]

Thx again ZeroKool, I did a test by ripping 4 or 5 samples using different filters and formats (VCD & SVCD).
Using these settings gives me a really good quality film, If I use VBR 2-pass and motion precision on highest quality I get near DVD quality....but it takes 9 hours per cut making it a near 30 hour rip...Doh!

Mobo/processor upgrade in the pipeline, but W98' prefers 256k ram against 512k ram so I'll stick with that I think.

Thx for help