Video Encoding/Decoding Causing Lag

Matchlighter · 20 Sep 2011

Today, I was trying to copy a DVD to an mp4. Whenever I started the process, my computer experienced severe lag. For instance, the mouse took several seconds to move and several seconds to process a click. I also discovered that this also happens when I try to convert a video I have on my computer. I opened Afterburner and Task manager, but neither my CPU or GPU were close to maximum load. I have never had this problem before, even with a Dual-core 1.8GHz Processor and a GT430 GPU. I have tried disabling CUDA in the conversion software, but it did not help. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks!
Ethan

Gornot · 20 Sep 2011

This doesn't really sound all that strange to me. Chances are that the encoder NEEDS to use THAT much resources, or is set as a very high priority process (which explains the lag) to do its thing. This with a combination of settings you put into the encoder can actually produce this lag very often. This is especially true for encoding to HD.

My personal policy when encoding videos is never to use the system during the encoding process, and (of course) prepare the system prior to it, like disabling A/V scanning, screensaver and power settings etc. so that would be my advice to you.

Matchlighter · 20 Sep 2011

I would agree that that would be a possibility, but I am not using HD and it has worked just fine without lag on a system with considerably lower specs. I have reverted the last variable (5.1 back to 2.0 audio). I am testing it now and it appears to work, but I will know for sure in a few minutes.

Matchlighter · 20 Sep 2011

Ok, changing back to 2.0 sound seems to have helped. I am testing to see if limiting it to 2 Cores (instead of all 4) will help as well, I am interested in this as the processor never read close to 100%.

Gornot · 20 Sep 2011

Depending on exactly how you set the options for audio encoding, the system may become slower, especially when encoding to 5.1 which (if it runs in sync with the video encoder) requires a very high bitrate, often multithreading etc.

Also, I see you have integrated sound. This explains a lot to me (I used to have an old nVidia nForce 2 back in 2004) and that sort of thing never happened to me until I got this new rig with Realtek's integrated sound.

Encoding audio/video isn't as easy as "one-two-three" policy of many "freeware" video converters with fancy UIs and 50 000 000 different encoding formats, so hopefully you can understand me being a smartass xD