Ridiculously long encoding for Handbrake

I looked and around and didn't see this issue covered.

I downloaded handbrake and vlc and seemed to load up the movie onto my harddrive ok (took around 24 hoursm which I understand is not that crazy). I tried to move it into itunes (it's a m4v file) but that didn't work. Then I saw on Handbrake that I needed to encode it. Ok, fine, but it says it will take 170 hours. That can't possibly be right.

But when I tried a small sample, it actually moved into itunes and played. Does this mean I really need to wait 6 DAYS to get this movie into an acceptable format for itunes? That's just crazy.

I tried just changing the file extension to mp4 but that didn't work either. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Sorry for the typos. Didn't preview.

You must be doing something wrong....i have used handbreak a lot and transfered hours and hours of video from it to itunes and my iphone and its never taken 6 days !

Clay

I agree. 6 days! I could load more than 100 movies in that amount of time. Are you sure the movies are decrypted properly? I've run into that problem with Acrose.

I have found for me that using the Apple Universal preset works just fine. And since I dont know what half of those settings do I just let it go...
Clay

beatrix doesn't say what age that mac is, but even a G4 could encode a movie in a few hours