AVC and AAC compression timings for 1 hour DVD movie (black and white)

Technology Sep 15, 2006

Using MeGUI I took just over 1 hour of DVD and compressed it down via the ‘state of the art’ compression schemes:

Video AVC (aka H.264 or MPEG4 Part 10) using the CE_Highprofile at 1000 kbps
Audio AAC using the FAAC 128 kbps ABR profile

The 1 hour, 5minute movie took over 5 hours to compress on a Pentium 4 3 GHz. This VOB had already been decrypted; so add another 15 mins for that step. Here’s the breakdown of the MeGUI timings:

Indexing the VOB to make a D2V file: 2 mins
AAC audio: 8 mins
AVC pass 1 of 2: 1 hour 10 mins
AVC pass 2 of 2: 4 hours 5 mins
Muxing of AAC and AVC to final MP4 file: 3 mins

A great thing about MeGUI is that all of the above is done without user interaction; via the One Click Encoding option. Pass 1 reported 23 fps, Pass 2 reported 6.7 fps
Quality looks excellent on final mp4 file. It started at noon and was done just after 5:25 pm.
Size comparison for this 1 hour 5 minute movie:

Original decrypted VOB is: 3.92 GB
Final mp4 is: 534 MB

But, to be fair, VOB has multiple soundtracks. Also this is an old black and white movie. Will try colour when I have another 5 hours to spare 🙂