Looking for alternative to MCEBuddy (1 Viewer)

[doveman]

I've been trying MCEBuddy for a couple of days and whilst it's a great app that mostly does all that I need, I'm wondering if there's any alternatives that will do the job more to my liking.

Firstly and most importantly, I find the encoding rather slow and I'd like the files to be compressed a bit more than MCEBuddy does. I'm compressing to Xvid AVI and it's roughly making them about three times smaller, but as they're only SD TV recordings, I think they could be compressed a bit more without the drop in quality being that noticeable (or if it is, not bothering me too much). To compress, it's roughly taking about one hour per hour of video on my Athlon II X4 630. I don't know if that's about right, but whilst mencoder's using all four cores, it's only pushing them to about 40% max. Even when I'm watching TV at the same time, it only goes to 45-50% max, so I'd prefer it if I could find something that will use more of the CPU.

I don't use the commercial skipping (tried it but it was cutting parts of the programme). I like the options to only compress between certain hours and to only compress programmes that are older than x number of days, so I'd want those in any alternative. I would like a pause function, so that if I want to watch an HD video that needs the CPU, or if I need to reboot, I can pause the compression and resume it when I'm ready.

So is there anything else I can use that will run in the background, checking a certain folder for .ts files over a certain age and compress them faster and smaller than MCEBuddy?

 

[romadd64]

MCEBuddy uses mencoder for encoding.
If you look in file mplayer\mencoder.conf in MCEBuddy install dir, there are all the parameters that MCEBuddy send to mencoder for every profile.
You can create or change a profile.

For example, the H.264 MP4 default profile rescale to 720 pixel and has a bandwidth of 1200. Change that value.

AVI compression uses two threads, so it uses no more than 50% of your CPU cores. H264 uses all cores.

romadd

 

[doveman]

Thanks for the advice.

I'm torn between AVI and H264 because, as you say, the former only uses 50% of my CPU so MP remains usable, whilst the latter uses as much of my CPU as it can, which makes MP rather unusable, but H264 does give noticeably better quality for the same file size. It would be nice if it were possible to specify how much of the CPU/how many cores H264 (and AVI for that matter, as it could go 75% and still leave MP usable) could use. I also have to bear in mind that people I know have DVD players that can only handle AVI, so if encode to H264 I'll be unable to share stuff with them.

So I think I'll have to stick with AVI for now, maybe encoding certain things separately if I feel they need the better quality of H264 and my friends are unlikely to be interested in watching them.

Now, regarding the settings for MCEBuddy/Mencoder's AVI profile, can you recommend what settings I can use to reduce the filesize whilst minimizing the impact on quality?