Conversion Taking Forever

[Slug]

Conversion of my recorded TV files to *avi takes forever.

A 30minute show (DVR-MS file of 1.3GB) will take 1.5 hours to compress to an avi of 325mb.
A 1.5 Hour movie (DVR-MS 4.5GB) can take over 7 hours

I'm using MCEBuddy (was using Crunchie - but it took even longer).

I would have thought a 3Ghz dual core processor & 2GB RAM would have been sufficient to nail these files (particularly given that nothing else is running at the time - Mencoder crunches away using around 80% CPU).

Any ideas as to how to improve conversion time?

[dgaust]

Lower the quality and/or change the encoder (h264 takes longer than xvid for example) used.... video conversion takes time, even with powerful CPUs. A dual pass encode of a 30 minute HD DVR-MS to 720p h.264 takes about an hour using my quad core.