WinXP temp directory and TooLAME - help wanted

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Question:

Can I change the directory that TooLAME uses to store temporary files? If not, as a workaround, can I change the default temp directory in WindowsXP without causing any problems?

Background:

I'm working with some video I've put together and I now have the finished version that I want to feed to tmpgenc to make a DVD-compliant file. The video is ~160 minutes, which makes it a sizable 15GB because I use Huffyuv while editing to avoid repeated lossy transcoding. Time to make and check the DVD-compliant file and save a lot of disc space...or so I thought.

I'm using TooLAME in tmpgenc because it gives better quality than the built-in engine. It fails with an unhelpful error message that just says there was an error while writing a stream.

I'm almost certain that the problem stems from the fact that TooLAME creates two temporary files while working, one of which is the sound in .wav format. I think it's uncompressed. That would be in the region of 1.5GB. I think it's trying to use the default temp directory, which is of course on the same partition as Windows. I only have about a gig free on that partition - I keep it small so I'm not tempted to shove everything on it and make imaging it more of a bother, but some games insist on saving hundreds of megs of data under the "My Documents" directory (which also gets on my nerves).
 
first of all create a temp folder on another drive/partition. now right click my computer, properties, advanced, environment. now under "user" edit the settings of both

tmp
temp

to the folder you created above. also look at "system" variable - again change tmp & temp to match. restart windows for these changes to take affect. :)
 
Restart Wndows...where have I heard that before?

winreboot.png


:)
 
Still the same problem.

I have made the changes and rebooted.

Environment.jpg


Temporary files (whatever their file extension) are now being stored in e:\temp.

A test with a small piece of video shows that TooLAME is still using C:

toolame.jpg
 
Hahaha, silly me.

Tmpgenc has its own setting for where to store temporary files. I'd overlooked that. Problem solved.
 
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