Encode times?

[macnut0964]

Just installed Popcorn3 on an 2.16 imac w/ 1 gig ram.

 

Am currently burning 6 episodes of one hour shows to dvd. Its been going for about an hour and is only 10% through encoding. Is this normal? Would additional ram help? 10 hours seems pretty extreme for a dvd's worth of data.

 

TIA

[tsantee]

What format are the source videos? Are you actually trying to fit 6 hours of video to one video DVD?

 

As for the speed it depends on many factors. More Ram always is good in speeding up processor-intensive actions such as encoding. But if I had more information about your project I might be able to suggest a faster method.

[macnut0964]

They are 6 avi files, 350 megs each. Roughly about 2 gigs of data so no compression was necessary.

 

I'm running Leopard if that makes any difference. The media is taiyo yuden 8x but that shouldn't make a diff as it never got past the encoding stage before i ended it after about 7 hours.

 

 

Thanks for your help.

[tsantee]

They are 6 avi files, 350 megs each. Roughly about 2 gigs of data so no compression was necessary.

 

I'm running Leopard if that makes any difference. The media is taiyo yuden 8x but that shouldn't make a diff as it never got past the encoding stage before i ended it after about 7 hours.

Thanks for your help.

What end result are you wanting? If you are wanting this to become a video DVD then your AVI's need to be re-encoded to the MPEG 2 format used in video DVDs. MPEG 2 is much less compressed than what's in those AVI's (often that could be DivX which is an MPEG 4 format but it could be from many other video codecs).

 

If these are DivX files then you could choose to make a DivX disc (or just burn a Data disc with the DivX files) and play it on a DivX-enabled DVD player. Many of the lower-cost DVD players have DivX playback capability. In that case they won't need re-encoding.

 

If you want a video DVD then it must be re-encoded and I don't recommend putting more than 3-1/2 hours of video on a single-layer disc. Anything beyond 2-1/2 hours has noticeably reduced picture quality.

[macnut0964]

What end result are you wanting? If you are wanting this to become a video DVD then your AVI's need to be re-encoded to the MPEG 2 format used in video DVDs. MPEG 2 is much less compressed than what's in those AVI's (often that could be DivX which is an MPEG 4 format but it could be from many other video codecs).

 

If these are DivX files then you could choose to make a DivX disc (or just burn a Data disc with the DivX files) and play it on a DivX-enabled DVD player. Many of the lower-cost DVD players have DivX playback capability. In that case they won't need re-encoding.

 

If you want a video DVD then it must be re-encoded and I don't recommend putting more than 3-1/2 hours of video on a single-layer disc. Anything beyond 2-1/2 hours has noticeably reduced picture quality.

 

Yeah, I'm trying to make a video dvd. I knew it would need re-encoding and that's what I figured popcorn was doing... I was just wondering why it took so bloody long.

 

As far as quality goes, I really don't care. The video is compressed enough as the avi that so long as it doesn't get any worse than that, I'm cool. I just wanna be able to watch veronica mars away from my puter.

 

I'll look for something else to re-encode the files first.

 

Thanks for your help man!