Handbrake is really SLOW on new mini

[pacmania1982]

In my experience, it is absolute twoddle about it not being enough RAM.

I have a much older 1.83GHz Mac mini with only 2GB RAM in it and I don't have a problem ripping or transcoding movies.

I noticed that when I got my 2009 13" MBP which is 2.26GHz, it was MUCH slower than the Mac mini at ripping movies using the same build of Handbrake, which was unexpected. I tried a nightly build and it improved significantly. Then when the next version of Handbrake came out, I upgraded to that and the performance was back to normal.

2GB of RAM might not be enough for the OS and Photoshop, but its enough for general surfing, email and ripping.

pac

 

[lickitysplit]

In my experience, it is absolute twoddle about it not being enough RAM.

I have a much older 1.83GHz Mac mini with only 2GB RAM in it and I don't have a problem ripping or transcoding movies.

I noticed that when I got my 2009 13" MBP which is 2.26GHz, it was MUCH slower than the Mac mini at ripping movies using the same build of Handbrake, which was unexpected. I tried a nightly build and it improved significantly. Then when the next version of Handbrake came out, I upgraded to that and the performance was back to normal.

2GB of RAM might not be enough for the OS and Photoshop, but its enough for general surfing, email and ripping.

pac

Are you running SL or Lion? Remember, the OP is running Lion.

 

[mdgm]

Are you running SL or Lion? Remember, the OP is running Lion.

That's a good point. 2GB RAM is fine on Snow Leopard. On Lion even with light usage I soon find lots of page outs and swapping. However there's no harm in trying with just 2GB RAM as you can easily check to see if your Mac is swapping in the System Memory tab of Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor).

 

[Chundles]

Handbrake can also be artificially slow if you're ripping directly from a DVD.

Current Macs have Riplock firmware on the SuperDrive to keep noise down when watching a DVD movie. It does this by limiting the speed at which data is read from a disc.

If you're ripping using the MacBook Air SuperDrive then you'll see slow speeds. Best to rip directly from the HDD or from a desktop-style external disc drive.

 

[ABTsportsline]

In my experience, it is absolute twoddle about it not being enough RAM.

I have a much older 1.83GHz Mac mini with only 2GB RAM in it and I don't have a problem ripping or transcoding movies.

I noticed that when I got my 2009 13" MBP which is 2.26GHz, it was MUCH slower than the Mac mini at ripping movies using the same build of Handbrake, which was unexpected. I tried a nightly build and it improved significantly. Then when the next version of Handbrake came out, I upgraded to that and the performance was back to normal.

2GB of RAM might not be enough for the OS and Photoshop, but its enough for general surfing, email and ripping.

pac

Kind-of apples to oranges in that the application & system are using less resources in your version.

The RAM recommendation would also depend on what size movies you're ripping. If you're trying to transcode a 5 Gb 720p movie, you'll obviously need more than 2 Gb of RAM. If you're only ripping the 700mb versions, 2 Gb of RAM will be slow but would still work.

 

[lkirkup]

It's not so much the RAM it's more the encoding settings being used.
I guarantee you will get the time down to 20 minutes if you switch it to the setting for iPhone. But of course the final product will be a much smaller and a much lower res.
You have to trade time for quality or vice versa!

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Are you booting k64 with 64-bit Handbrake? Cuz that's snappy...

Applications run in their own "space" (userspace). 64-Bit apps have nothing to do with a 64-Bit kernel.

 

[BlackMangoTree]

Set up Handbrake as usual and then copy and paste this under the advanced tab
"ref=1:weightp=0:subq=2:rc-lookahead=10:trellis=0:cabac=0:b-pyramid=none:vbv-maxrate=9500:vbv-bufsize=9500"

Quality will be virtually identical as default setting.

Speed will dramatically improve MUCH faster.

 

[blueroom]

The sad part IMO is the HD 3000 graphics in the 2011 Mac Mini can do H.264 encoding in hardware Quick Sync and is pretty snappy about it. Too bad there are currently no native OSX apps that support it.