Handbrake encoding time comparison on different hardware.

[Grimley]

OK Folks,

I thought I'd create this thread with the hope that someone on here will find this useful.

I did an upgrade to my Ryzen PC earlier today and I thought I would make a comparison with all the hardware that I have using handbrake as the benchmark.

To those who don't know, handbrake is an open-source transcoder for video files. I use handbrake for transcoding .mkv files to MP4 files making them smaller so they can fit on my phone.

I know there's plenty of handbrake comparisons out there, but I wanted to give people who are interested an idea of real-world handbrake comparisons, particularly those who are interested not streaming films on their portable hardware, but transcoding stored content on their PCs to smaller files as their devices dont have the space & 1080p isnt really required or not supported.

For this comparison, I used one .mkv file. it's 1080p and the file size is 9.3 GB.

I used the 720p30 Android setting on handbrake, to transcode the 1080p .mkv file to 720p .MP4 file. The file did shrink down, I will tell you the file sizes later on.

Both Intel CPUs are running on integrated graphics.

Both ryzen CPUs were running on Nvidia GTX 950.

There are 4 results:

The dual core Skylake laptop with W10 I own, transcoded the file in 3 hours 11 minutes.

My everyday quad core i5 Broadwell running Linux mint, transcoded the file in 59 minutes.

My Ryzen PC with an R5 1600 in it before the upgrade running W10, transcoded the file in 41 minutes.

My upgraded Ryzen PC with an R5 3600 transcoded the file in 29 minutes.

Both Intel CPUs transcoded the file size to 1.98 GB

Both Ryzen CPUs transcoded the file to 2.01 GB

There's no point summing up, the results speak for themselves.

 

[darael]

My Intel i5-7500 can encode a 30 minute 576p DVD to a customised H.265 video in about 20 minutes and the file size averages around 150 MB. There's no rush for me, I just build up a queue and let it complete in it's own time.

I could perhaps speed things up by turning off settings, such as de-noise and de-interlace.

 

[Grimley]

Interesting, Never thought about transcoding a DVD, done it before but not with the hardware I have now. Just got to find a film on DVD that I want to watch. My mum works in a charity shop on Tuesdays, there's loads of DVD's people donate to the shop. Guess I'll find out. There'll be no R5 1600 results though, thats out of the PC now & I'm debating about whether to keep it & wait for a family member to say 'I need an upgrade' or to put it up for sale on the MM.

 

[darael]

@Grimley
Did you transcode blu-ray films which were ripped to MKV format? I might try your settings with a blu-ray and post my results.

 

[Grimley]

Yep.

 

[jpaul]

so does handbrake now offload onto a gpu ? I had investigated another encoder/staxrip that did this and it was faster but with poorer quality results ,
(due to limited instructions on gpu's)
What was the original codec mpeg-2 ie dvd, so was it a re-encode, because the target was a different codec

I'd explore vp9 options too, since it may consume less battery power, playing back on your phone.

 

[Tyrion2]

haven't used handbrake in a while but it was cpu based when i used it (no gpu use).

ps, @Grimley on the latest ryzen build (3600), is the cpu using all threads and cores? I have a 3700x and it loves this stuff, although the encoding program sometimes needs tweaking if it's not using all cores and threads. Encoding will happily use 100%cpu.

pps, the issue i had with handbrake was the audio encoder, in case you encode the audio too instead of just passing it through. The encode used to sound 'tinny/metallic' with handbrake. Perhaps that's been improved in recent times.

 

[Grimley]

so does handbrake now offload onto a gpu ? I had investigated another encoder/staxrip that did this and it was faster but with poorer quality results ,

It does utilise intel quicksync and nvidia and amd versions of it, i've seen these features in the preferences part of the program (on the windows version though, not seen it on the linux version).

on the latest ryzen build (3600), is the cpu using all threads and cores? I have a 3700x and it loves this stuff, although the encoding program sometimes needs tweaking if it's not using all cores and threads. Encoding will happily use 100%cpu.

It does according to windows task manager. BTW there are passthrough for almost all sound formats except dolby HD, that format will NOT pass through. It downscales to dolby digital. I've no idea if it will passthrough dolby atmos as I don't have any dolby atmos hardware to test it.

 

[Grimley]

Interesting, Never thought about transcoding a DVD, done it before but not with the hardware I have now. Just got to find a film on DVD that I want to watch. My mum works in a charity shop on Tuesdays, there's loads of DVD's people donate to the shop. Guess I'll find out.

Well here I am almost 3 weeks later, Stuck at home on my day off 'cos Boris doesnt want me to go out for a coffee in case I catch something Found a DVD in my collection I'd forgotten about. One quick .MKV file later & creation of a 6.2GB file, Same rules as before & the results. (all transcoded down to roughly a 1GB .MP4 file each time)

The dual core Skylake laptop with W10 I own, transcoded the file in 51 minutes.

My everyday quad core i5 Broadwell running Linux mint, transcoded the file in a shade under 20 minutes.

My upgraded Ryzen PC with an R5 3600 transcoded the file in 10 minutes 9 Seconds.

 

[OspreyO]

The problem with comparing results is not all video files have the same amount of complexity. some will compress more than others, some will be harder and thus take longer than others to compress.

I generally encode Blurays. I've kinda stopped though I feel its a form of digital hoarding, and it was taking too much time and resources.

That said I'll do one just to see. Though its probably all online anyway.

 

[OspreyO]

...

There are 4 results:

The dual core Skylake laptop with W10 I own, transcoded the file in 3 hours 11 minutes.
My everyday quad core i5 Broadwell running Linux mint, transcoded the file in 59 minutes.
My Ryzen PC with an R5 1600 in it before the upgrade running W10, transcoded the file in 41 minutes.
My upgraded Ryzen PC with an R5 3600 transcoded the file in 29 minutes.
Both Intel CPUs transcoded the file size to 1.98 GB
Both Ryzen CPUs transcoded the file to 2.01 GB

There's no point summing up, the results speak for themselves.

Assuming the handbrake estimates are accurate and I'm using a 9.2 GB File

Xeon E3-1245 v3 (3.40 GHz 4 cores 8 threads) 46 mins
Dual CPU Xeon X5670 (3.33 GHz 12 cores 24 threads) 32 mins (10 year old CPUs - )

They have 1050ti's, but I don't think this is using them its just the CPU's.
I have a vastly faster brand new Workstation at work, but I'm not uploading a 9GB file to test it.
Whats interesting is the machines are still perfectly usable for doing other things (like work) while trans-coding.

 

[Grimley]

/\/\ I rounded the times off to the nearest minute the first time round. I could go into the Handbrake activity logs but with gaps that large is anyone going to care about a few seconds? The time on those old Multi-core setups are not too shabby, bear in mind that they must've cost a pretty penny when new & compare them with the cost of new hardware?

 

[Grimley]

BTW there are passthrough for almost all sound formats except dolby HD, that format will NOT pass through. It downscales to dolby digital. I've no idea if it will passthrough dolby atmos as I don't have any dolby atmos hardware to test it.

I'd forgotten about this thread A quick update about the latest version of Handbrake for Windows. This version DOES passthrough Dolby HD now, so I re-encoded all of my uncompressed Dolby HD MKV's & I've now got the total file size of my compressed MKV's of which there is about 100, down to about 1TB when it was about 1.3TB, so that's a fair bit of hard drive space saved if you don't have much.