Help Handbrake takes over 2 hours to convert .mkv file?

[hal1]

Is it typical for Handbrake to take over 2 hours to convert 660mb .mkv file to mp4?

I'm using an older version since I'm paranoid about upgrading to the current one since this one works fine for my needs

 

[jhsrennie]

The time taken depends on the conversion settings and your PC speed, but two hours is not unreasonable. Transcoding video is very CPU intensive.

MKV and MP4 are just containers. If you don't want to change the video stream you could just unwrap the MKV and rewrap it into an MP4, and this should only take a few seconds. Think of it as decompressing a zip then making a new zip without changing the contents. I'm not sure if Handbrake does this but there are lots of (nerdy and difficult to use!) apps that can e.g. ffmpeg.

 

[Deleted User]

Two hours seems a little long, but as said above, it depends on settings.

I am using an app called XMedia Recode to repackage my MKV files into Apple TV-friendly MP4 files. This drops the time to about 10-12 minutes per movie since there's no video transcoding, only audio (most MKV files come with DTS audio which gets converted to AAC). While it's not exactly the most easy-to-use app, it's better than most of the others out there.

That only works if you want to keep the video codec the same, though. If you're trying to convert Xvid to X.264 or something, that won't help.

 

[njramsfan]

I had this same issue. My pc would take about 2-3hrs to conver the mkv file. I bought a new laptop with 3rd generation i5 processor and the converts take less than 1hr now.. so it could be pc.

 

[Skyroket]

Why convert? Just drop it in the phone and play it.. I never convert mkvs they work and play just fine on nexus 7 and gnex

 

[whs37]

Looks normal to me. A 660MB file is a very big file. Even my Desktop with i7 and SSD would take a while.

The N7 has a 4core ARM processor and one may think that 4 cores could do the job a lot faster. But an ARM (reduced instruction set) processor is not as powerful as an x86 processor - and then you don't know whether Handbrake even uses all 4 cores.

When I do file conversion on my desktop, only 20% of my CPU is being used and 3 of the 8 cores are completely idle.

 

[Rcarnes91]

This is why I always get my media players to be able to play anything so much easier then trying to change formats on every file

 

[whs37]

This is why I always get my media players to be able to play anything so much easier then trying to change formats on every file

For playback this is, of course, the ideal solution. But sometimes you cannot avoid a conversion.

I have a superb lossless video editor (on the PC) that accepts only .avi and .wmv. So sometime you need to convert. And .flv is a problem with most editors - even in WMM, but they fixed it in WLMM.

 

[dave1812]

When I make 800MB to 1 GB video files on an i7, it takes over 40 minutes. Slow computers take HOURS to encode video.