[Titanium Man]

Any suggestions for decent apps to encode DV to either MPEG2 or H.264?

I've tried Cleaner 6 and it's slow as molasses, about 50:1 realtime to MPEG2 (with inverse telecine). If it was faster, I'd go to MPEG2 then use Diva to compress to Xvid. Sorensen Squeeze is about as slow with H.264 and can't do inverse telecine worth a damn. I've tried moving the iMovie-exported DV file to my PC to encode using Windows tools, but Windows can't seem to read that file.

Is there any decent application for the Mac?

[wulf]

Compressor?

Presumably you're doing some kind of (Panasonic?) 24p-on-29.97 DV thing, thus the inverse telecine, and I've not really used this workflow. But if it were me, I would consider doing the inverse-telecine to a transitional codec as an extra step, then deal with the format compression from the 24p master file.