I'm largely ignorant of video encoding and curious about other Handbrake
users and wanted to ask what you do when you copy/backup your movies to
a server. Are you just copying the VIDEO_TS file and then playing it
over the LAN or do you convert/compress it during the rip to conserve
quality and save disk space? Do you use the pre-sets to convert to your
favorite hand held device or use size, bit rate or constant quality? Do
you have a minimum file size before you see a difference in quality?
Appreciate your feedback.
I tried something different today, by converting/compressing a 7.63 GB
VIDEO_TS file from the hardrive (640 GB WD Black) instead of my 22x SATA
optical drive (takes about 20 minutes just to get it on my hardrive for
conversion). I crammed it down to 700 MB's (because I like the idea of
being able to burn to a CD-R if I choose because they are so cheap). I
used the Turbo First Pass to write the log file with the 2 pass method,
h.264 codec/.m4v container. Using 6 cores the first pass ETA was 26+
minutes from optical and 16+ minutes from hardrive. Second pass ETA was
about the same from optical and just over 14 minutes from hardrive with
CPU usage jumping from half to almost 100% during the actual encoding.
Then to see the difference extra cores make I went into
Msconfig/Advanced Boot Options and disabled 2 cores, rebooted and ran
the same experiment again with the same programs loaded giving it time
to settle down. Everything started to fluctuate wildly with ETA between
14-27 minutes and CPU usage between 20-90% first pass log creation. 2nd
pass ETA (100% CPU ) was also pretty bad and I'm sure I should have used
a stop watch for an accurate time. Between bad ETA's and Vista's
notorious disk I/O it was probably a bad experiment but I'm sure of 2
things. Everything happens faster from the hardrive with the more cores
the merrier.
