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Handbrake Converting at 7-8fps on MBP 2.0 Core Duo 1.5GB Ram... is that slow?

JonHimself

JonHimself

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 3, 2004
1,553
5
Toronto, Ontario
I've never had problems with Handbrake, always felt it ripped a movie (even on two-pass) within a couple of hours... I've never paid attention but I could rip 2-3 movies while I was at work for 8 hours.
I use two-pass and I've noticed that the first pass is anywhere from 30-50fps using the turbo pass option but the second pass drops to a crawl (as the subject says 7-8fps). I don't know for sure, but to the best of my knowledge it was never THAT slow.
A few weeks ago, I dropped my mbp (it fell out of my bag onto my driveway). It still works, but seems to over-heat/freeze/have the display turn off randomly (but often). I'm not sure if this would be related to causing the slow but, but figured it was worth mentioning.

I've attached a screens shot, please forgive the fact it's legally blonde 2, I swear it's for my girlfriend. I use the Apple TV preset and tweak it a little bit but nothing major is changed. I do notice that the 'large file size' option is checked, could that cause the problem?

I currently (and always have) ripped from a USB drive, saving the file back onto that USB drive so I can't imagine that is the problem since that hasn't changed.

Any thoughts?
 

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Thats slower than my old G4 from 6 years ago. Pluss doing it from a USB drive can also cause slow down. USB has troubles with dealing with a lot minor file transfers since it never gets the chance to get up to full speed. Still seems very slow for a MBP. My 2nd gen MBP does about 30-20 FPS. Could also be the codec your converting from as well.
 
Sounds about right to me. I have a 1.83GHz Core Duo iMac with 2GB RAM. Using HB 0.9.3, the universal setting bumped to 62%, and ripping stereo and AC3 audio tracks, I average 7-9fps. It usually takes 4-5 hours per movie. I used Fairmount to rip video_ts folders, and I keep 5-6 movies in the que at all times. I just recently started converting my movies, so it'll be awhile before I'm done.

7-8fps sounds right for your settings win your machine.
 
lostless said:
Thats slower than my old G4 from 6 years ago. Pluss doing it from a USB drive can also cause slow down. USB has troubles with dealing with a lot minor file transfers since it never gets the chance to get up to full speed. Still seems very slow for a MBP. My 2nd gen MBP does about 30-20 FPS. Could also be the codec your converting from as well.
Click to expand...

I'm converting from a dvd ripped with RipIt (or MacTheRipper... I just switched so I still have some DVDs to convert from MTR). I will try doing it from the internal harddrive to see if there is a boost.
 
rspeaker said:
Sounds about right to me. I have a 1.83GHz Core Duo iMac with 2GB RAM. Using HB 0.9.3, the universal setting bumped to 62%, and ripping stereo and AC3 audio tracks, I average 7-9fps. It usually takes 4-5 hours per movie. I used Fairmount to rip video_ts folders, and I keep 5-6 movies in the que at all times. I just recently started converting my movies, so it'll be awhile before I'm done.

7-8fps sounds right for your settings win your machine.
Click to expand...

It's good (I guess?) to know that you're times are about the same, but I'm more confused about why it seems to be slower now than it was previously.
 
On my early '08 iMac with only 1GB of RAM Handbrake averages around 40/50fps when it's ripping straight from the DVD, and roughly 70/80fps when converting a file that's either on my hard drive or on a flash drive. I have the same sort of results on my MBP with 2GB of RAM. Your results don't seem normal...to me anyway...
 
My iMac C2D @ 2.0GHz usually rips in the low 30's FPS. I find it normally takes about as long as the movie is to rip one. That's my experience, anyway - YMMV. :)
 
Ivan P said:
On my early '08 iMac with only 1GB of RAM Handbrake averages around 40/50fps when it's ripping straight from the DVD, and roughly 70/80fps when converting a file that's either on my hard drive or on a flash drive. I have the same sort of results on my MBP with 2GB of RAM. Your results don't seem normal...to me anyway...
Click to expand...

Are you using the AppleTV preset? The settings will make the frames per second rate wildly different for each preset.
 
It would help to know exactly what settings everyone is using when doing Handbrake encodes, and what version of Handbrake everyone is using.

OP, are you using HB 0.9.2? The preset for ATV in 0.9.3 is constant quality, not an average bitrate, so I presume you are using the older version. From what I understand, 0.9.3 is faster than previous versions (correct me if I'm wrong though.)

For me, I use 0.9.3, with the new Universal setting (which is H.264, which takes longer to encode) bumped up to 62% constant quality, and have detelecine and decomb turned on. I rip an AAC stereo track and an AC3 surround sound track for audio. Video_TS folders are stored on an external USB drive (I've found fps/encode time doesn't change much at all whether reading from my USB drive, my FW drive, or my internal drive,) and the encodes are saved to my internal. With this setup, I average 7-9fps, and it usually takes 4-5 hours per movie.

That being said, encoding a movie in MPEG4 at 640x480, 2250kbps with detelecine and decomb, and with a stereo track... my machine will average 25-40fps.

I think in the case of Handbrake, the settings are going to be more important than the hardware (unless you're on a Mac Pro.)

Back to the OP: if you are using average bitrate for your movies, I would agree, 7-8fps is quite slow. It should probably encode faster than that.
 
It depends on your settings.
I have a 2.16 core 2 duo macbook and i get slower encodes than that with my current settings, but I have used others in the past that result in much faster times. Let us know if you are using a preset or if you have made custom settings as that will make the biggest difference.
 
rspeaker said:
It would help to know exactly what settings everyone is using when doing Handbrake encodes, and what version of Handbrake everyone is using...

OP, are you using HB 0.9.2? The preset for ATV in 0.9.3 is constant quality, not an average bitrate, so I presume you are using the older version. From what I understand, 0.9.3 is faster than previous versions (correct me if I'm wrong though.)...

Back to the OP: if you are using average bitrate for your movies, I would agree, 7-8fps is quite slow. It should probably encode faster than that.
Click to expand...

That's for the info on your situation (and to everyone else for posting their speeds... it looks like a mixture of similar speeds and much faster speeds)

I'm pretty sure it's .3 (I can't check now, I will when I'm home). I know that I changed it from the Constant Quality setting to create my own preset. I took the Apple TV preset (I'm not sure what it defaults to) and the rest of the settings that I know are the audio track up to 160kbps, h.264 (which I think it uses by default), two-pass (with turbo pass) and average bit-rate (it also appears as if Large File Size is checked off, I'm not sure if that's a default or why it's even checked...) if the video needs to be de-interlaced, I will add that as well but other than that, whatever the Apple TV preset has, I have, no addtional tweaking.

Like I've said, I don't remember changing anything and I know that my movies never used to take so long. Only recently has it slowed to a crawl (the first pass still is very quick, but obviously the second is to be slower... just don't remember it being this much slower).

When I get home (later today) I will post the detailed settings, I know that in reading the handbrake forums I've seen people have copy/pasted that information, would anyone know where/how to get that detailed info? I'll look as well but if that can be passed on then it'll be quicker to get the information on here later today.
 
JonHimself said:
When I get home (later today) I will post the detailed settings, I know that in reading the handbrake forums I've seen people have copy/pasted that information, would anyone know where/how to get that detailed info?
Click to expand...

Yep. http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/ActivityLog

copy and paste that into a pastebin such as pastebin.ca and post the link to the paste here ( I am pretty sure macrumors would rather you did not try to include the whole thing in a forum post ).

While 0.9.3 is faster with the same settings as 0.9.2 0.9.3's presets are slower since they are higher quality. That activity log will show exactly what you are doing.
 
dynaflash said:
Yep. http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/ActivityLog

copy and paste that into a pastebin such as pastebin.ca and post the link to the paste here ( I am pretty sure macrumors would rather you did not try to include the whole thing in a forum post ).

While 0.9.3 is faster with the same settings as 0.9.2 0.9.3's presets are slower since they are higher quality. That activity log will show exactly what you are doing.
Click to expand...

That's great, thank you!
 
k.

first, your average time on pass two was
[12:55:05] work: average encoding speed for job is 8.893811 fps

so almost nine fps. which is still a touch slow however, two things if it were me.
for your options (advanced panel) which are:

[08:36:09] + options: level=30:cabac=0:ref=3:mixed-refs=1:bframes=6:weightb=1:direct=auto:no-fast-pskip=1:me=umh:subq=7:analyse=all

I would drop weightb=1 as we realized after releasing 0.9.3 it could cause issues with the atv and just slows things down. also were it me I would go with bframes=3, which should help. I would also use direct=spatial which is faster and you could use subq=6 which is also good for a speed bump.

Having said all of that, really you are a touch slow, but going from a usb drive back to the same usb drive (if I read it correctly) you really aren't far off the mark at all.

Oh, and really unless you have good reason, I would use constant quality over average bitrate any day. Just my .02
 
Mr Kram said:
dynaflash, do the options you suggest have any effect on quality?
Click to expand...

Well, yes on an abr (average bitrate encode) they do. On a Constant Quality encode not so much.

Average bitrate == HB will sacrifice quality to hit the bitrate you specify.

Constant Quality == HB will keep a specified quality bitrate be damned.

This is really the crux of why HB's presets for 0.9.3 are constant quality based. That and the newer apple devices can handle much more bitrate than before. Including the atv since about software rev 2.1 or so.
 
dynaflash said:
k.

first, your average time on pass two was
[12:55:05] work: average encoding speed for job is 8.893811 fps

so almost nine fps. which is still a touch slow however, two things if it were me.
for your options (advanced panel) which are:

[08:36:09] + options: level=30:cabac=0:ref=3:mixed-refs=1:bframes=6:weightb=1:direct=auto:no-fast-pskip=1:me=umh:subq=7:analyse=all

I would drop weightb=1 as we realized after releasing 0.9.3 it could cause issues with the atv and just slows things down. also were it me I would go with bframes=3, which should help. I would also use direct=spatial which is faster and you could use subq=6 which is also good for a speed bump.

Having said all of that, really you are a touch slow, but going from a usb drive back to the same usb drive (if I read it correctly) you really aren't far off the mark at all.

Oh, and really unless you have good reason, I would use constant quality over average bitrate any day. Just my .02
Click to expand...

Thank you very much for that! Definitely more than I expected to hear! A question about "drop weightb=1" do you mean just delete that entire line?

You are correct about the USB drive (in and out from the same drive). I'll try to free up some space on my laptop and give that a shot to see how it speeds things up as well.

In terms of the constant quality, I've never been able to jump on-board with it, for whatever reason... it was never a space issue, I have too many enough store solutions to make sure that I'll be able to store everything for now (until I can actually get a legitimate NAS set-up as opposed to the make-shift one I have now)... I just always went with the average bit rate. Knowing that I use 2500kbps as it is for all movies (that's not true, for some movies that I don't have an HD version of but really like I will use 3000kbps...) so let's say I normally use 3000kbps, what % would you suggest to start using?
Using math, and interpreting the code I posted - I'm better at math, so please forgive me - it looks like the original source is 9800kbps and I'm converting to 3000kbps which is ~30% of the source.... the apple TV preset suggest 59% (I think, maybe it was 69%?) so selecting the quality doesn't seem as simple as I would think about it. I've read a few threads in the past and 30% definitely doesn't not seem like it would make sense - despite what I just said about.... so after that long rampble... suggestions? How would a 59% constant quality rip compare to a 3000kbps average rip? I'm not looking for an indepth answer, just thoughts on how they stack up to one another.
 
JonHimself said:
A question about "drop weightb=1" do you mean just delete that entire line?
Click to expand...
Not the entire line, just the "weightb=1:" the ":" is a separator. without that specified handbrake will use the default of weightb=0.
JonHimself said:
You are correct about the USB drive (in and out from the same drive). I'll try to free up some space on my laptop and give that a shot to see how it speeds things up as well.
Click to expand...
well, even using firewire or your mbp's own disk, it is almost always a speed bump if you are not reading from and encoding back to the same drive. Like in my case I read my source from one firewire drive and encode to another firewire drive. Give it a try, as always ymmv.
JonHimself said:
How would a 59% constant quality rip compare to a 3000kbps average rip? I'm not looking for an indepth answer, just thoughts on how they stack up to one another.
Click to expand...
lol. there really is no short answer.

Constant quality will retain that amount of visual quality from your source no matter what. So it is *very* source dependent. Therefore there is no way to compare to a 3000 abr encode. However, in general I can tell you that using the appleTV preset as is in HandBrake and only bumping the CQ slider up to 62% (read: leave the options as is) will give you an encode generally transparent to the dvd source visually. File size and bitrate will fluctuate from source to source. Grainy sources with alot of action will end up with a higher bitrate/filesize and clean sources with little complexity will end up much smaller *with the same visual quality* between the two.

I can tell you that *in general* a cq encode at 62% will look every bit as good (if not better) than the 3000 kbps abr encode and will likely come out smaller.

Imo, the only reason to use a bitrate specified encode is for a device that is severely bitrate limited, which in apples lineup is really only the older 5G iPod's with video where you really cannot go over 1500 kbps.

Just my .02
 
dynaflash said:
...lol. there really is no short answer...

Constant quality will retain that amount of visual quality from your source no matter what. So it is *very* source dependent. Therefore there is no way to compare to a 3000 abr encode. However, in general I can tell you that using the appleTV preset as is in HandBrake and only bumping the CQ slider up to 62% (read: leave the options as is) will give you an encode generally transparent to the dvd source visually. File size and bitrate will fluctuate from source to source. Grainy sources with alot of action will end up with a higher bitrate/filesize and clean sources with little complexity will end up much smaller *with the same visual quality* between the two.

I can tell you that *in general* a cq encode at 62% will look every bit as good (if not better) than the 3000 kbps abr encode and will likely come out smaller.

Imo, the only reason to use a bitrate specified encode is for a device that is severely bitrate limited, which in apples lineup is really only the older 5G iPod's with video where you really cannot go over 1500 kbps.

Just my .02
Click to expand...

That's perfect. Thank you again for the help.

I think I was just stuck in the habit of using the abr setting and just couldn't convince myself to switch. The varying file size isn't an issue either. To be honest, I'm almost completely done my DVD ripping (after a couple of years at least and few re-rips) so at this point I'm just looking to finish everything and be done with it and if you're saying that 62% is good, I'll take your word for it! I suppose the other advantage of the cq is that there is no need for two-pass encoding!

I'll try out encoding from and saving to different drives as well and see if that makes a difference (or encoding from and saving to internal drive), maybe some other variations so that it's not in and out of the same drive, every bit helps!
 
This is all really intersting to read. Jon Himself, I hope you don't mind if I jump in with my thoughts and a few questions too!

I'm currently ripping my movie library to an external drive both for backup/and travel purposes. I've been doing everything at the apple TV setting and selecting "2 pass" and using the abr of 2500. I tried using Constant Quality by bumping it up to about 65 (what seems to be the recommended), and the encode was terrible. Very blocky. So I went back to the standard Apple TV settings, which are producing files that either a little under 2 gigs, or a little over. Space really isn't an issue for me. For some reason, I think I'm doing something wrong with the CQ setting.. everyone raves about it, but it looked really bad on my screen.

I think I'm on the latest version... at least when I "check for updates" from within handbrake's file menu it doesn't return any updates. Hwoever, I don't have any settings for "Universal" in my presets. I'm trying to make as transparent a copy as possible. In my limited testing, Apple TV seemed to have the best settings, but I'm a noob to all this so any recommendations would be appreciated.

RE: Time- when using handbrake reading from an external USB DVD drive (the internal one in my mini is shot) I average from 5-8 FPS. When using handbrake from an image created by Mac the Ripper (old freeware version) i get anywhere from 25-37 FPS. Therefore I've only been using DVD drive to Handbrake when a disc has copy protection that the old version of MTR can't surpass.

Any pointers? What am I doing wrong and not taking advantage of?

Will things like:
I would drop weightb=1 as we realized after releasing 0.9.3 it could cause issues with the atv and just slows things down. also were it me I would go with bframes=3, which should help. I would also use direct=spatial which is faster and you could use subq=6 which is also good for a speed bump
Click to expand...

make a big difference? Most of that kind of stuff goes right over my head. Trying to research settings in the handbrake forums is liek reading greek sometimes!
 
jrm27 said:
I think I'm on the latest version... at least when I "check for updates" from within handbrake's file menu it doesn't return any updates.
Click to expand...
Like all mac apps. HandBrake > About HandBrake will tell you what version you are running. Latest public is 0.9.3.
jrm27 said:
Hwoever, I don't have any settings for "Universal" in my presets.
Click to expand...
well, you have to update your presets as well as update the app.

Presets > Update Built-In Presets will make sure you have current built in presets.
 
Thanks dynaflash. That is what I had assumed! In the "About handbrake" it said it was the latest, but since the presets hadn't updated as well, I was a little confused. Perhaps when I get home and reset the presets it will make more sense!

Any thoughts on my methodology? Woudl that disconnect between version and presets explain why my CQ adjustment results were so poor?
 
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