Harmy said:
To be honest, this is not as much about you waiting, as it is about me having my computer bogged down by encoding and unable to do anything else properly for so long. I mean, I wouldn't mind if I knew it was unavoidable but if it can encode that fast at first and then it slows down gradually, and if the same video with the same settings can take anywhere between 12hrs and 45minutes, it seems like there's something wrong somewhere.
Not sure what kind of a processor do you own but in the case that you have a multi-core processor and the encoder allows it you can always play with the affinity settings and let the main core do something else than encoding :-)