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killer_735 · Jun 4, 2003, 11:02 AM

Anyone have experience encoding Mpeg-2 to Divx 5 on a PB12" with 640MB ram?

Just wondering about nominal FPS. I used to average about 1/2 realtime on an Athlon 1Ghz with 1.12Gb of Pc133 ram, and Geforce2mx200.

Also...what proggies would anyone recommend? I'm inclined to think that iMovie isn't best suited for such a task.

threestain · Jun 4, 2003, 11:48 AM

I code on a 1GHz tibook with 512 RAM, and I get about realtime encoding - about 30mins for 30 mins of data. So you should get between 75% and 80% realtime I reckon.

this is using ffmpegX

Michel_80 · Jun 5, 2003, 09:16 AM

Threestain, what resolution do you encode to?

I am interested in doing 512x or 640x dvd conversions.

threestain · Jun 5, 2003, 11:28 AM

I have been encoding at PAL DVD size - 720 x 576, at divx of 1000 kbits. Hope thats helpful!

killer_735 · Jun 5, 2003, 12:08 PM

You used a consistent bitrate? Mine were always near there, but depending on the length and encoding type of the DVD in the first place, they had to be varied. Also, why not use VBR encoding? Set bit rates seem to take up more space than necessary these days......were you in fact shooting for 700Mb to fit on a cd, or were you shooting for consistent quality among all the rips?

threestain · Jun 5, 2003, 04:20 PM

I was aiming for constant quality, and am unsure what to aim for. also there is no option to do vbr in ffmpegx

cc_foo · Jun 5, 2003, 08:32 PM

This certainly is a topical topic for me... I never understood encoding until I tried FFMPEGX yesterday. I encoded the Animatrix DVD. on my iBook 800. It was all very exciting, and the result was OK.

Man... took about 6 hours (or more). I was using the iBook for other things intermittently while that was happening though. e.g. iTunes, surfings, emailing etc. Even burnt a CD.

Anyway, this is off topic. So I'll stop now.

killer_735 · Jun 6, 2003, 08:44 AM

I'm not at all familiar with FFmpegx, but the option for different encoding types should be in a menu for the DivX codec. Since we're all working on Unix, systems (essentially) I think that a Unix-based, open source video encoding proggie would be the best.....can anyone recommend one that would run on OSX?

cc_foo · Jun 6, 2003, 08:49 AM

Originally posted by killer_735:
I'm not at all familiar with FFmpegx, but the option for different encoding types should be in a menu for the DivX codec. Since we're all working on Unix, systems (essentially) I think that a Unix-based, open source video encoding proggie would be the best.....can anyone recommend one that would run on OSX?

ffmpegx does just that. It's just a pretty front end to Unix software that does the encoding. It also showed me where to get the unix programs that I needed to install first.

The other program I tried was MissingMPEGTools, which I think works with MPEG-1/2, VCD and SVCDs.

killer_735 · Jun 6, 2003, 09:10 AM

Oh....sweet.

(slightly off topic...)

One of my favorite things about OSX is that it has helped disspell the image of mac users as people who need all their apps to be self-contained, with no folders, config files, etc.... In other words, a bunch of giant dear-god-why-am-I-even-trying-to-use-a-computer-when-I-can't-even-comprehend-basic-tasks-type AOL users. It makes me much more optomistic about the future of computing when I see Apple actually taking advantage of an open-source kernel and, on top of that, mac users working with it and learning to use a new system, instead of fearing the big, bad, bash shell and the evil terminal. GUIs are nice, esp in x, but I think it's important to call it what it is...a tool, that has its uses and weaknesses like any other tool.