Handbrake 0.9.4 slower?

15 years ago

I use Handbrake and AnyDVD to rip DVDs I buy to iPhone/iPod Touch format so that I can watch them on flights. Since I fly quite often (to the DevExpress offices in Glendale, various conferences, home in England, etc), watching what I want to watch during these boring flights has been a life-saver, or at least a sanity saver.

I recently updated to the latest Handbrake, version 0.9.4. Nicer GUI, more intuitive selection of options, a zillion fixes, seemed like a winner. Just now I started to rip the zeroth episode of Doctor Who series 4 (The Voyage of the Damned). It's a 72-minute episode and it damn well took nearly 72 minutes to encode. WTF? Encoding speed was about 30 frames per second and during the entire time the CPU meter didn't go above 30%. In essence, it was not using all four cores I have on this desktop, which frankly is a waste of time and resources. I checked the options and it certainly should have used them all.

So, I uninstalled it and reinstalled 0.9.2 -- the previous version I'd been using -- and started on the next DVD for episodes 1 to 3. The CPU meter is resolutely nailed to 100% and the encoding speed is around 100 fps. Much more like it, however I'm flummoxed to understand why the later version isn't as fast or, rather, why it's not using multiple cores. Oh well, can't be bothered to investigate, I just want to be able to get the job done quickly.

Posted via email from Julian's posterous

Fri 8-Jan-2010 3:05 PM posterous / tags: no tags given
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2 Responses

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#1 Davy Landman said...
09-Jan-10 1:53 AM

Apparently they've rewritten their logic for the encoding quality, the single-pass quality based approach defaults could perhaps not enable the multi-threading by default.

I would check the settings, and if there is a cpu core option, set it to 0 (automatic) or your number of cores to force the multithreading, according to the changelog 0.9.4 should actually be faster.

julian m bucknall avatar
#2 julian m bucknall said...
11-Jan-10 3:07 PM

Davy: Yep, did all that. In fact, my experimenting with version 0.9.4 went along the lines of: set some option, run HandBrake on a DVD for about 2 or 3 minutes. If there was no improvement in speed, cancel, try some other option. So I tried the "Automatic" option for the number of CPUs, and also setting it to 4 (which is the number of cores in my machine).

In the end, as I said, I gave up, uninstalled it and reinstalled 0.9.2, which worked at full speed out of the box.

Cheers, Julian

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