Lee,

The biggest change we did for videos was a video card (Osprey, Digital Rapids, etc). They took some of the CPU load away from the computer and would encode a 1 hour video in 1 hour.

Then if you had say..two or three different profiles it would then take about 1.5 hour.

This is all using .wmv. The hog of all files.

When you add such items as "deinterlacing" and other filters...
Or you are taking a 5000 Kbps and brining it down to 250Kpbs. Or you are doing VBR instead of CBR it will also take more time.

Windows Encoder does a great job on most items without any cost.
But if you are geeky enough you can get the Encoder SDK and then tweak it to take advantage of dual processors or hypertreading.

After working on encoding, building some encoding softeware packages and helping others with getting a few 100 to 1000s of videos/audios on line I now know I no nothing... <smile>

As soon as we add a feature or tweak a settings something new comes along. Then I have to go back and do it all over again.

My best suggestion.
Get a basic encoder card from Digital Streams. Use it and then Ebay it.
It will make life easier and your files will look a lot better.

Steven