Encoding uses almost all CPU, so the slower and fewer cores your CPU has, they slower the process will be. Right now, I am encoding on an i7 system running windows 7 and I can encode a movie in about an hour, but thats doing a 2 pass encode with around 2000 kbps, so I wind up with a 2GB down sampled film that looks just as good as it did when it was a 4 or 8GB DVD. I am currently using DVD Fab 8 for this, I realize this thread is about handbrake, just pointing out what I use. You can't really speed up the process, its entirely based on your hardware, so short of upgrading to a faster CPU, which of course is not an option in a laptop, you are stuck with what you have.
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How can I speed up Handbrake?
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Make no mistake that handbrake is *ALL* about cpu, the underlying x264 encoder will not benefit from gpu. It is handcrafted to maximize cpu. Also you will note that ram is not much of a benefit either. To say that the "primary device for Handbrake encodes is the graphic card ..." is completely erroneous and misleading ... at best.
This would only be true if you had say an older ppc mac, anything that is intel c2d or above ... handbrake will be just as fast if comparing "apples to apples" as far as settings. The elgato software is notorious for using nerfed down settings.
Thank you
I really appreciate all the helpful posts. For some people buying the latest and greatest new computer and keeping up with technology every year isn't an option.
So from what I take it handbrake isn't the best option in terms of speed. I also have Windows 7 on boot camp. So I will look into other encoding programs.
Any other recommendations?
Again, thanks.
I really appreciate all the helpful posts. For some people buying the latest and greatest new computer and keeping up with technology every year isn't an option.
So from what I take it handbrake isn't the best option in terms of speed. I also have Windows 7 on boot camp. So I will look into other encoding programs.
Any other recommendations?
Again, thanks.
Download the latest nightly build of Handbrake, make sure you update the built-in presets and use the new "Normal" preset. It turns off most of the more CPU-intensive x264 options and speeds things up a fair bit. Quality/efficiency will suffer a bit but there you go.
My i7 3,4 Ghz quad iMac 2011 does a 90 minutes movie in ~20 minutes, with the only setting changed being average bitrate set to 2000 bps (And of course a random selection of my language + english language + subtitles).
My girlfriends 2,2 Ghz C2D Macbook Pro does the same in ~80 minutes.
Edit: 4 GB RAM in each.
My girlfriends 2,2 Ghz C2D Macbook Pro does the same in ~80 minutes.
Edit: 4 GB RAM in each.
I recently built a PC primarily to use as a compute server for handbrake. I didn't need a fancy graphics card, so the system was very cheap to build. It's based on a 4-core 3 Ghz AMD Athlon II CPU ($100) and 4 GB of fast DDR3 RAM. The total parts cost was only about $300.
This system runs HandBrake much much faster than my 2007 MBP. The absolute fastest Core i7 system might have been another 2X the speed of my cheap compute server, but it would have cost a lot more and I'm quite satisfied with the speed of my system (less than an hour to convert a movie).
I recently got the Elgato Turbo H264 for my eyetv setup, and i have noticed that the FPS in HB seem to be allot higher with the usb connected. but I also noticed on the one MKV that I transcoded recently, the audio was out of sync, but not sure if that was the source or not....I havent had time to look.
I may have been wrong about what chip HB uses to decode/encode but I can tell you for certain that the iMac 2008 models that I compared gave a significantly different experience in HB encoding.
iMac Core 2 Duo (08) 2.8 24" 3.06 24"
Intel Processor: E8235 E8435
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz 3.06 GHz
Video System: HD 2600 PRO 8800 GS
Video Type: GDDR3 GDDR3
Video Memory: 256 MB 512 MB
Display Size: 24-Inch 24-Inch
1hr DVD Encode 60 mins 45 mins
What is the difference here? 0.26Ghz CPU and different graphics cards. Both have 4Gb RAM. Both running Leopard.
I find it hard to believe that the CPU is the only factor in the encode speeds?
Running Windows 7 on the 2.8GHz machine (bootcamp) gave slight better results of around 42mins.
I tried to keep all the encode settings the same but there is a chance I missed something, and there is a chance that there is something running in background that I couldn't find... but I don't think there is.
Open to being flamed but this is real world tests done last night. I really must get out more !!!
iMac Core 2 Duo (08) 2.8 24" 3.06 24"
Intel Processor: E8235 E8435
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz 3.06 GHz
Video System: HD 2600 PRO 8800 GS
Video Type: GDDR3 GDDR3
Video Memory: 256 MB 512 MB
Display Size: 24-Inch 24-Inch
1hr DVD Encode 60 mins 45 mins
What is the difference here? 0.26Ghz CPU and different graphics cards. Both have 4Gb RAM. Both running Leopard.
I find it hard to believe that the CPU is the only factor in the encode speeds?
Running Windows 7 on the 2.8GHz machine (bootcamp) gave slight better results of around 42mins.
I tried to keep all the encode settings the same but there is a chance I missed something, and there is a chance that there is something running in background that I couldn't find... but I don't think there is.
Open to being flamed but this is real world tests done last night. I really must get out more !!!
Handbrake really only uses the CPU. Faster RAM may give some boost but it probably would only be 1-2 FPS so not really noticeable. I know that Handbrake doesn't use the GPU at all because the developers seem to refuse to even look into GPU acceleration.
What you really need to understand is that the encoding speed is almost completely due to the x264 encoding library that HandBrake uses. When x264 uses the gpu, so will HandBrake however don't hold your breath as x264 is largely handcrafted asm code designed to max out the cpu, preliminary tests they have done trying to shuffle stuff off to the gpu have shown little to no speed up and in some cases actually slower. Also it is correct that HandBrake can in no way utilize the elgato turbo stick.
Now that said there are several things that could bottleneck handbrake like video filters which are not always as threaded as they could be. For instance Denoise is not threaded. So turning on denoise could slow down the same encode compared to if its off. Also realize it only takes one change in the advanced options to either slow down or speed up an encode. For instance using subq=6 is much faster than subq=11 however the resulting encode may not be good from a visual quality prespective.
Comparing exact settings on the same source is the only way to get an objective comparison of speed vs. quality and you will be very hard pressed to find a faster / higher quality encoder than x264, it has come out on top in the mmsu video encoder shootout for the last several years.
Also, another note ... since hb can soak all cpu cores in most systems systems check your cpu temps, sometimes hb can cause excessive cpu temps and the os will "thermal throttle" the cpu(s) which will cause it too cool down but you are basically underclocked. I know after I took my 2006 c2d mbp apart and cleaned it out (especially the fans) I ran about 20 degree C cooler and my encoding speeds jumped a good 7-8 fps faster.
Not according to Activity Monitor.
When I launch a Handbrake job, all four cores and eight threads of my i7 peg to 100%.That being said, moving to Lion has about halved my FPS, but then this is evidently a known issue. The latest nightly build does not seem to have addressed this.
I found the best way to improve speed with handbrake is to first use makemkv and then run handbrake on the ,mkv file. It saves a lot of time. The other advantage of this method is that you can queue multiple .mkv files on handbrake to convert overnight.
I understand that there are limitations to how x264 works but from some of the forum posts I have read about x264 and GPU acceleration it sounded to me like the developers ( wether Handbrake or x264 developers) just dismissed the possibility without even really looking into it. I don't know if that is really how it is but that's what it looked like to me last time I looked to see if GPU acceleration was in the pipeline for Handbrake/x264.
I suppose that the issue is a little moot to me now as I built a new PC a few months ago mainly designed for fast Handbrake encodes and now I'm perfectly happy with the speeds I'm getting.
Looked up real world benchmarks for the two processors :
Source
E8435 (2272) vs E8235 (2019) meaning that the E8435 is approximately 12.5% faster. Thus if it took 45 minutes to encode, the slower machine should take 50.5 minutes. So what's the difference?
Hard to say. Was the disk ripped to the hard drive? If not, the DVD drive could be the difference. If so, could be the hard drive (may not be the same model drive). Could so be processes running. Something else using up cycles that you don't know about? I would guess it has something to do with the hard drive; that's an item that is often switching models and can make a vast difference in something like this.
At home I have two PC's I built at the same time with identical components all purchased at the same time. The hard drive on one is significantly faster then the other even though they are the same make and model even manufactured about the same time. Both are good, but when loading the same game on both one always loads a few seconds faster. That's the way it is; in your case, if one drive is slightly faster then the other, over an hour it could add time to your encode (or take it away).