How to Speed Up Conversions

General Support / Questions
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The biggest improvements that users can do are:

  • Use the latest build of MCEBuddy since there have been many optimizations made to the overall process and will yield the largest no change speed improvement (e.g. 2.4.1 is upto 30% faster than 2.3.15 which is upto 50% faster than 2.3.13 depending up on your conversion options it can make a significant difference)
  • Enable hardware encoding in Conversion Task Expert Settings (Intel QuickSync, NVidia NVEnc etc). Make sure you’re using the recommended driver versions for stable and fast performance. (see this topic for more details)
  • If you source video is of good quality use the Normal or Fast profile, the High Quality profiles VERY SLOW and only help/make a difference if your source quality video is not good. Even most SD quality source video’s don’t need the high quality profile. An ideal scenario for high quality would be source video is less than 480 pixels, is interlaced or has transmission fuzziness. Most videos’ today don’t need anything more than Normal quality processing. If you need to improve quality us the Quality slider instead of moving to high quality profile, it’ll yield better and faster results.
  • If you don’t need h.264 video use MPEG4 profiles like DIVX instead of MP4 or MKV or tweak your MP4/MKV profiles to use mpeg4 instead of h.264 as the video codec (if you don’t have hardware encoding). You will see a significant increase in performance with smaller degradation in quality (particularly for non HD video or high bitrate profiles)
  • Use a faster CPU and set the priority to Normal (Low will severely degrade performance)

There are other things you can tweak but there may be trade offs or have smaller improvements

  • Use the Skip remuxing option if you have the donator version of comskip and your source is WTV
  • Use the Skip copying original file option (at your risk, this is dangerous if not used properly and can cause unexpected results - heed the warning)
  • Reduce Max resolution slider if you don’t need higher resolution
  • Reduce the Quality slider if you don’t need higher bitrates

We’ll keep this list updated as more features are added in future.