Handbrake is only showing 30-50% CPU usage on an i7

I'm trying to understand why this is, but I haven't found any answers so far. When encoding 180MB, 25min xvid files down to 90MB x264 mkv's I only get 30-50% across all cores and it takes longer than realtime to do each file.

I thought the CPU is always the bottleneck in encoding situations? The work's being done on it's own drive, so that's not an issue. I monitor everything, so I'm sure nothing else is using resources. Ideas?

Hah, this made me do some reading up on this stuff.
It's still just as complex as it was a few years ago. Anyway, x264 itself can scale to 100% on recent processors. However, video encoding (and in your case, decoding from another format as well) has more moving parts than just the main encoder.

In other words, other parts of the decoding/encoding process are probably dragging you back. And I would have no idea where to start with that.

Sources (and they include worthless posts with misinformation as well):
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=154345
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=155533
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=153808
http://doom10.org/index.php?topic=343.0

Thanks, I just read through those. I found some other similar posts too. I just don't get how other parts of the process can be holding it back if those other parts aren't using resources.

Socket eh? said:

Thanks, I just read through those. I found some other similar posts too. I just don't get how other parts of the process can be holding it back if those other parts aren't using resources.

Click to expand...

The first thing I would consider is the capability of the file conversion program to utilize your i7's full potential. Is the program a newer program and up to date?

Socket eh? said:

Thanks, I just read through those. I found some other similar posts too. I just don't get how other parts of the process can be holding it back if those other parts aren't using resources.

Click to expand...

Yep - you're best bet is to figure out exactly what steps (and using what modules) are being taken in your process. Then ask someone who knows better what's the bottleneck

You are reading a file from a hard drive and writing it back to the same hard drive? Its possible you are i/o limited rather than cpu limited, but 25+ minutes doesn't sound right for the size of the files you're working with. Still might be worth checking the number of iops going on or the disk queue length with perfmon.