[FFmpeg-user] About ffmpeg transcode time

[Nicholas Robbins]

> On Thursday, June 26, 2014 4:15 AM, Francois Visagie <francois.visagie at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> You could do a short test encode of the first x frames and use the printed
> Duration and fps values to calculate a very rough estimate.

Be careful that you pick a representative section. If it is a movie for instance, they often start with very simple frames (Logos and black) that, I find, encoded 2-3x faster than the main section.

Given that most transcoding has variables to control "quality", "speed", "bitrate", etc, the answer is very variable. For a point of reference, SD video encodes with libx264 crf 17 preset veryfast at about 50fps on my  Core2 Duo T5270 @ 1.40GHz.

-Nick