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[psiborg.ca]

Hi all,

I've just finished doing all the searches I can think of in the forum and no one seems to have an answer about setting the process priority for the encoders.

I'm using Media Center 10.0.173 (Registered) and I really don't want to believe there's no way to get the MP3 encoder to run in "Below Normal" or "Low" process priority. When I'm encoding or converting formats, I can barely use my computer because LAME takes up all the resources running in Normal Priority. I know about the tricks of increasing the priority of the application you want to use etc. etc. but this really isn't a good solution.

Can anyone help me find an answer? I really think that if a setting can't be made available to the user that the default should be "Below Normal" priority.

[Alex B]

I suppose the problem is the LAME encoder itself. At the time when it was first introduced encoding used to be a painstakingly slow process, thus the encoder uses everything it can get. I don't think LAME has any options for using less CPU time (perhaps I should check this, I'm really not sure).

One solution could be to use a Hyper-Threading capable MB and P4 CPU. LAME can use only one of the virtual processors and the CPU usage is only 50%. My Hyper-Threading enabled system stays responsive during the encoding. The drawback is slower encoding speed.

[psiborg.ca]

Hi Alex,

I've looked at the LAME encoder and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have any built in commands to adjust its own process priority class. Regardless of this, the responsibility for setting priority should not fall upon LAME itself but the program that uses it no? I believe MediaCentre should be the one responsble for setting this value and I guess I'm not sure why such an easy option was never incorporated. Any developers care to shed some light on this? As an example, if LAME were called from the command line you could use "START /BELOWNORMAL LAME.EXE [LAME Parameters]" to set it to run in BelowNormal priority. This would not slow down encoding one bit except when system resources were required for a more important function... like moving the mouse around If the computer were idle while this was running, the encoder would still use all available CPU resources.

Thanks for the suggestion on a possible solution, I kind of read it as.. "MediaCentre wasn't designed to control encoding priority so why not just buy another computer and dedicate it to MediaCentre". The logic seems a little faulty here