[Jacke]

I have a pretty high-quality avi file with wmv3 video that I'd like to convert to something I can actually use. (I haven't checked the dimensions yet, but we're talking ca. 90 MB for about 5 minutes.) I'm thinking I'd either encode it to MPEG-4/XviD or to MPEG-2, with the target being to keep as much quality as possible while still not going crazy with the filesize (that means not going to uncompressed or lossless).

I don't have direct access to a PC (I've VPC and a friend with a PC), so what bothers me most is the time issue. Would re-compressing such a high-quality file in VPC take so long that it would be just as good to pay a visit to my buddy and do it there? For the record, I did try once to re-compress wmv3 to XviD in VPC before, but that was a bit lower quality file (700x386, 4 min) and it still took about an hour to compress...

So what I'm asking is, would compressing to MPEG-2 go faster than compressing to MPEG-4/XviD, and how would they compare quality-wise to the original wmv3?

Edit: Turned out to be a misnamed .asf file, so I can view it as is in WMP and use the Flip4Mac plugin to convert.

[Uncle Skeleton]

are there any video cards with hardware accelerated MPEG2 encoding? I mean I know there are, but do any consumer cards have it? in my experience MPEG2 encoding is always a lot slower than MPEG4, for whatever reason.