Quick Question about encode rates

i was just wondering if 1fps with x264 is standard, ive been trying for the last 5 days to encode a movie from 1080i to 720p, but no matter what settings i use it always encodes at 1-2fps which takes nearly 24 hours on my pc. Athlon64 3200+ 768mb DDR333 200gb 7200rpm hdd 9800 Pro Thanks.

2fps is normal when encoding from one HD format to another. I just finished a complete movie encode with the default x264 settings (plus 8x8DCT enabled) from a 1920x1080i TS source to 768x432p (2/5 the original resolution) getting about a 4fps on average, so it should be more than twice as slow in your case (720p). I use a similarly speced PC. (2600+). At 1000k the resulting x264 encode at that resolution is stunning and almost indistinguishable from a DVD version of the same movie :)

yeah its the 20odd hours of encoding thats a killer though :(