Convert / compress woes ... help!!

[chefjeff1373]

I just started using MakeMkv to rip DVD, haven't tried Blu-Ray yet. The default settings appear to work ok for starters. Now that I have a ripped DVD movie in *.mkv I would like to compress it from 5GB down to ~1GB. Any suggestions?
I have been using Handbrake to rip dvd and it does a good job, but takes ~2hrs to rip
and compress. I thought the bottle neck was the dvd player rom speed and just
accepted this theory. I just ripped a movie dvd using MakeMkv and saved the mkv file
to my hdd. I then used Handbrake to convert/compress to mp4 ~1GB. To my suprise
it still took appx. 2 hrs ( using the 2 pass and slow settings) to convert/compress even
though the source mkv file was on my hdd not dvd player.
Anybody have any solutions to speed up the compress time?

Thanks Mucho

[Chetwood]

Get a faster machine.

[chefjeff1373]

Yeah, that would have been one of my guesses also, but I don't think it's the machine ... AMD 3.9 4 core / 16GB / 2xRaptor 10k raid0 data drives. I'm going to test drive conversion / compression software today and see if that makes a difference. Any other suggestions? Maybe a Handbrake config problem? Any VLC / Video Lan gurus out there

[Chetwood]

There's not much you can do wrong with Handbrake's default settings (use constant frame rate though) and a CRF setting of 18 or 20. For a test, extract a 1 min clip and encode this instead of testing the whole movie.

[Woodstock]

Handbrake support is over at forum.handbrake.fr, and they can help you with settings. You will need an encode log to get support; the forum has how to find that in RED BOXES at the top of pretty much every page.

The actual rip is NOT the bottleneck in handbrake - it's the fact that compression is computationally intense. AMD 4-core processors are NOT as fast using HB as 4-core Intel processors, due to the way the processors can switch tasks. I have two machines here that are nominally the same clock speed, and the 4-core Intel can convert about 25-40% faster than the AMD, on the same source data with the same handbrake settings.

If you are processing multiple disks, your best bet is ripping with MakeMKV, then feeding the results to handbrake as a batch.