Forget the holiday, man, people need to start ripping stuff now! Now! NOW!
Just to clarify, I only own the G5. Someone else owns the MacBook Pro I was using. As for what drives each uses, Everymac.com tells me that my G5 uses a 4X/8X/16X/10X/32X SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW), and the MBP uses either a 4X single-layer DVD±RW/CD-RW SuperDrive or an 8X dual-layer DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW SuperDrive, depending on the model.
But I don't think the drives make much difference, it's the CPU that's the bottleneck here. And actually, when
I rip content, I extract the clip I want to my HD and *then* convert it using MacMPEG2Decoder. So, if anything, the MBP makes my computer even more pathetic by encoding at least 6x faster *while* ripping directly from the DVD.
Or, I was hallucinating. That's why I'm so curious (and yes, a little impatient) to see what others have to say. I might be totally crazy, or missing some crucial difference. Perhaps it's my G5 that's so slow, rather than the MBP being fast. I have no other frames of reference aside from a brief time using that one MacIntel laptop :/