How Long Should It Take?

[LVWolfman]

Replay Converter will convert a short (30 seconds or so, 2 MB flash) file from Hulu in under a minute. This is going from flash to mp4/450.

But when I try to do a movie... ~600 MB, I'd expect it to take about 3 to 5 hours (extrapolating from the 30 second files.)

However, I'm trying to convert a hulu movie and Replay Converter has been running for almost 13.5 hours.

This is twice I've tried to convert a movie using Replay Converter and the last time I cancelled it after 10 hours as I needed to use the computer for something else that required a reboot.

[LVWolfman]

Answered my own question. It took 18.5 hours on a P4D 3.00 Ghz machine with 2 GB of ram and Windows XP to do that transcode. The results were so bad I deleted the movie due to the massive pixillation.

Does anyone have any suggestions/settings to get better quality out of the transcode? If not, I'll just have to leave them in FLV format and go back to ripping from DVDs. A rip and burn takes 16 minutes to an hour or so on this machine, and about an hour to rip to mp4 from DVD with good quality.

[Cheryl Wester]

I don't know what version of Replay Converter you are using or how you have it set up in your system. Generally, it takes about 75 percent of the time to convert a file if you are using version 2.8.

If you have not tried the beta I would really recommend that. It works really fast. As an example I converted a 2 hour movie in about 20 minutes and I used a high resolution bitrate in the conversion.

http://www.applian.com/replay-converter/

[LVWolfman]

Sorry, I guess I should have specified all of that.

I'm using Replay Converter 2.80 (I just bought and downloaded it all in the past week as well as buying the WMConvert package as that is what you folks are recommending to use for Netflix streaming, though it seems to be unusable for that.)

I did the standard install of Replay Converter. I used a flash video file created by Replay Media Catcher 3.00.00 (July 30 build) of a standard res Hulu movie, The Girl Next Door which is 110 minutes or so.

I had Replay Converter set to convert to MPEG-4 Video Good Quality (450 kbps) but otherwise used the defaults. It read from/encoded to my local C: drive (SATA 250 GB 7200 RPM) on a P4D hyper threaded 3.00 Ghz machine with 2 GB of ram and an AGP ATI Radeon 1650XT with 512 MB of ram. The system runs Windows XP Pro SP2.

Transcoding time was 18.5 hours. The beta doing it in 75% of the time would be just under 14 hours.

I'll download the beta and see what difference it makes.

[LVWolfman]

It certainly isn't the hardware so it must be the settings. I tried another program that just converts FLV to other formats and it took about 20 minutes while looking almost as good as the original FLV file.

So I'll install the beta tonight and run some tests playing with whatever settings I can change.

[helloandwahtever]

I keep the resolution and frame rate the same as original. I see 640x360 @ 23.976 fps is common for many FLV files that started life as film. Try that. Or at least leave resolution and frame rate constant during a simple conversion to just another format, like AVI for example.

Converting the same FLV to MPEG-2, 720x480 @ 29.97 fps for an NTSC DVD, can seriously take some time. That might be why.

[Mike Christensen]

Originally Posted by helloandwahtever

I keep the resolution and frame rate the same as original. I see 640x360 @ 23.976 fps is common for many FLV files that started life as film. Try that. Or at least leave resolution and frame rate constant during a simple conversion to just another format, like AVI for example.

Converting the same FLV to MPEG-2, 720x480 @ 29.97 fps for an NTSC DVD, can seriously take some time. That might be why.

A new version of Replay Converter, version 3.0, just came out. Please download and install it from the Replay Converter download page: http://www.replay-converter.com/repl...erter/demo.php

Best regards,