[Benfried]

Hi guys, I'm new to this forum as a member, although I've often read its merry contents before. I'm a Mac user of 17 months (coconutbattery informs me), I've got a 1.33 GHz 12" albook which I absolutely love to bits and rely on absolutely, it's simply perfect for uni (tho a 10 inch mini xbook might steal some adulation...)

My question is this: H.264 encoding is very processor intensive, yes yes, but I was wondering what order of encode times people get with Quicktime Pro on their powerbooks? I'm at something vaguely like 5 hours for a single-pass encode of a 1/2 hour tv recording... So I was just wondering what other people's machines are like? And anyone using a G5, I'd still be v interested.

Thanks a lot!
Ben

[moodymonster]

I gave up on anything over 20mbs (17" 1.33), I'd be interested in G5 times as well.

There's also ffmpegX:

http://homepage.mac.com/major4/

which is supposed to be faster than QT Pro. Dunno whether it is or not.

[albook]

I have a 1.5GHz PowerBook and my H.264 encoding time for a 20 min movie is ~3 hours.
Settings: H.264, single-pass, 2000Kb/s. AAC, 128Kb/s

x264 encodes faster, but I have not compared its quality against H.264.
A QuickTime plugin was released earlier this week, so its easy to give it a go : https://developer.berlios.de/projects/x264qtcodec/

[macintologist]

Originally Posted by Benfried

Hi guys, I'm new to this forum as a member, although I've often read its merry contents before. I'm a Mac user of 17 months (coconutbattery informs me), I've got a 1.33 GHz 12" albook which I absolutely love to bits and rely on absolutely, it's simply perfect for uni (tho a 10 inch mini xbook might steal some adulation...)

My question is this: H.264 encoding is very processor intensive, yes yes, but I was wondering what order of encode times people get with Quicktime Pro on their powerbooks? I'm at something vaguely like 5 hours for a single-pass encode of a 1/2 hour tv recording... So I was just wondering what other people's machines are like? And anyone using a G5, I'd still be v interested.

Thanks a lot!
Ben

You should use ffmpegx

http://homepage.mac.com/major4/

It's A LOT faster, a bit complicated to use but you're a smart lad, you'll learn how to use it.

[chefpastry]

I tried converting a DVD to h.264 using Handbrake once. 640x300 (I think), two-pass. I did it on a PowerMac MDD dual 1.42GHz. It took about 24 hours. I haven't tried again since...