[MEncoder-users] Optimizing Mencoder on Ubuntu vs FreeBSD

[Andrew Edmond]

All --
 
I previously ran mencoder on several FreeBSD 5.4 systems, which ran
wonderfully well.  We were doing a lot of processing of large videos into
XVID and DIVX, and 2 hour long files were taking around 10 hours to run a
single pass plus two bit rate second passes (700Kbps and 1500Kbps).
 
We recently changed to Ubuntu Linux to support the new On2 Flix Engine for
Linux (which also runs mencoder), and though the Flix Engine works great,
the speed on Linux for the XVID encodes works TERRIBLE.  The encodes are
taking now 24 hours instead of 10, a 140% time increase.
 
I've upgraded to the Ubuntu Kernel for 686 and SMP (2.6.12), and that didn't
speed anything up at all. 
 
The machines we are running on are 512MB Pentium IV (Compiled for x86 CPU
with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2), and 10K SATA hard drives on stripe for
speed.  These are the same machines that were running FreeBSD 5.4 running
mencoder, so I know it's not a hardware issue, but some Linux optimization
issue I'm missing.
 
Anybody ever been through this problem before, or am I missing the "optimize
mencoder for Linux" web page somewhere?
 
Thank you!
 
Andrew