[QE2]

Thanks for the follow-up. After re-reading the post, I see that this is not /just/ an x264 problem.

Thank you also for informing me that hardware encoders aren't very good. I had actually considered purchasing one of the ~$100 ones, but now I'll steer clear.

I must be doing something wrong, though, because I can't seem to get much better than 2x real-time on my Q6600 w/ 4GB memory when using x264.

[DarkShikari]

The meaning of 2x real-time, of course, depends entirely on the resolution.

x264 now has encoding presets you can use to trade off speed for compression: they go from "ultrafast" to "placebo" (full list in the help). Grab the latest from x264.nl; we've also had a lot of speed improvements lately ;).

Do note that at high speeds, it's easy to get bottlenecked: the most common case is the decoding of the input, which is often only single-threaded. If your input is uncompressed, then you can get bottlenecked by reading it off the disk. And if you're running filters on the input (e.g. resizing it), that can also serve as a bottleneck.