The embodiment of the invention relates to the technical field of information processing, and discloses a transcoding duration estimation method and device, a terminal and a storage medium. The methodfor estimating the transcoding duration comprises the following steps: obtaining software characteristic parameters of a media file to be transcoded and hardware characteristic parameters of a transcoding device corresponding to the media file to be transcoded; according to the software characteristic parameters, the hardware characteristic parameters and the transcoding duration estimation model, determining the transcoding duration of the media file to be transcoded, wherein the transcoding duration estimation model is obtained by training according to the software characteristic parametersof each transcoded media file in the sample training library, the hardware characteristic parameters of the transcoding device corresponding to each transcoded media file and the transcoding durationof each transcoded media file. According to the embodiment, the transcoding duration of the media file can be accurately estimated.