Speeding up encoding - ideas?

[imanta]

I am running a bunch of movies and encoding them at various bitrates under H264. Anyone have any ideas on the best way to speed this up. Does HB do better with more RAM, more processors, faster processors (a general yes to all I am sure). Looking for ways to speed the process up is all and open to ideas. Also, if this is better handled by another app I am happy to try something else.

[TedJ]

H.264 encoding is very CPU intensive so you'll see the most benefit moving to more cores or overclocking the ones you have now. Extra RAM will make very little difference.

[hunterk]

If speed is more important to you than efficiency (i.e., better quality at a given bitrate), you could turn down some of the advanced options to faster/lower-quality settings, such as dropping the subme setting (the most direct speed:quality tradeoff, IIRC), no trellis, etc.

If you're using Constant Quality, doing this will speed up your encodes but they will end up larger in size. If you are using Target Size or Avg Bitrate, your encodes will look worse at a given size/bitrate.

As far as hardware, it's primarily cpu-bound, so giving it more cores at higher clock speeds will provide the most improvements, as TedJ said.

[mduell]

Faster CPUs always helps, more cores sometimes helps.

Use no-mixed-refs:rc-lookahead=10:ref=1:subme=2:trellis=0:weightp=0 as your x264 options string (advanced tab) for better speed (x264 "veryfast" preset).

[Deleted User 11865]

FWIW, with the latest x264, veryfast just switched to weightp 1 (following this).

[Smokerz]

you need more processor cores. 4 is good and 6 is better.