How to Increase Blu-ray H264 Encoding Speed

Blu-ray technology was released in 2006 and brought with it a new generation of high-definition movies and entertainment. As sales of players and discs increased, more and more people purchased high-definition entertainment systems that included a HD DVD player.



Blu-ray uses the H.264 codec to compress audio and video for the format. This compression process means large video and audio files can be made smaller to fit on the disk and is designed to do this while retaining the high quality of the audio and video.

Upgrade your system

• 1

  Upgrade your processor in your PC. This will be the single most important way to increase your compression times as the compression software relies on the processors to run the complex calculations necessary to encode to H.264.

• 2

  Increase the disk speeds in your PC. The faster the hard drives spin, the faster they can access information for the software to process. Most PCs come with disks that spin at 5600 RPM (revolutions per minute). Upgrading to 7200 RPM discs will show an improvement in compression speed.

• 3

  Upgrade the connections to any external media you are using. Consider using firewire or eSata drives instead of USB connections, as this speeds up data transfer between your PC and the external drive.

Managing your PC

• 1

  Close all other programs that are running when encoding H.264 for Blu-ray. Other programs may be accessing your processor capacity, which will take away from the capacity the software compression can use.

• 2

  Check your hard disk space. Not only will the compression be using up space as the software runs, but low disk space means less place for the software to place temporary files as it works, slowing the process down.

• 3

  Disable any automatic updates that may interrupt the compression process. If you are going to leave the software running, any automatic updates will begin processing and slow down the system, increasing the time for H.264 to encode.

Adjust the H.264 settings.

• 1

  Reduce the bit rate of your encoding software. This reduces the quality of the video and will take less time for the software to encode to H.264.

• 2

  Reduce the number of passes to two. Some software allows for single or two-pass encoding. Two-pass encoding takes longer but results in higher quality video.

• 3

  Shorten the length of the video you are encoding. The shorter the source material, the quicker the software will encode the video and audio to H.264.