Improve conversion time for .mts and .mov files

[mafco]

After importing either .mts or .mov files from a camcorder, the file needs to be converted to an editable and burnable format for dvd creation. The coversion
process takes about two times real time on my pc (xp). If I am already maxed out on RAM, would a solid state hardrive upgrade significantly speed up the conversion process? I am currently using a Hitachi 500gb; 7200 rpm hdd.

Thanks for any replies.

 

[hang-the-9]

Upgrade the CPU. Only thing that will speed things up really. If you want to optimize things, ugrade CPU and get a faster drive. Encoding will pretty much always take longer that just play-back.

 

[mafco]

Thanks for the reply ht9. By upgrading the CPU do you mean replacing it with a faster multi-core or
just getting another system altogether. For now, I want to use what I have (Intel core2cpu/1.8ghz-T5600). The drive I'm using is pretty good (7200 rpm) but the RAM is maxed at 2 gb. I believe all 3 components (cpu, ram, hdd) determine the video/dvd creation speed. Since I'm staying with the cpu and RAM at this time, do you believe a solid state drive would be much of an improvement since its read/write speed far exceeds that of mechanical drives?

mafco

 

[hang-the-9]

A new drive would add maybe .25% speed increase in your case. A 1.8 gig dual core is one of the very first generations of them, and 2 gig is a bit low also. Although I doubt 2 gig is the MAX your system can take. You probably just have two RAM slots but you can get 2 gig sticks and bring that up to 4. I don't think there is a single dual-core system with a 2 gig RAM max at system level.

The first thing you need to upgrade is the CPU, then RAM, then the drive if you want. See what the max CPU is for your system, but if it's a 1.8 gig, you may be better off replacing the whole box.

 

[nicelynicely]

I wouldn't bother getting an SSD, it wouldn't really improve the conversion times much and they money would be better of being spent on the cpu as that is the main factor int he conversion time, however i would probably just get a new system if you do a lot of conversion, the Sandy Bridge Cpu's are pretty good and as h.264 is multithreaded it will benefit from the extra threads.

Alternativly if you have a nvidia graphics card (8600 or higher) then you could use that to convert the videos, using software like Badaboom, however i don't know if it will be any faster than converting it on your cpu, guess it would depend on which video card you had, also using this method you will be limited in terms of what formats you can convert to as badaboom only outputs to mp4 i think.

I converted a 1080p m2ts file using badaboom in 4minutes 50 seconds at a 10,000 bit rate
I was able to convert the same file using the same settings in 37 seconds using mediacoder on my i7-2600k