How????

[ulrik]

Anybody who knows more than me about the new Quicksilver G4s and DVD Studio Pro and iDVD, please tell me how this could be? I know the new Quicksilver is fast, but this is so over the top...and next month iDVD 2 is released for OS X which is rumoured be even faster!!!!

Building and burning a 4,7 (4,55 actually used) gig DVD from MPEG2 and AC3 material and Photoshop PSDs for the menus, scripts and everything in under three hours...ok...this MIGHT be possible (not to mention the realtime MPEG2 and AC3 decoding without stutter in the preview window)

Preparing and burning a 58 min iDVD 1 project all from Quicktime movies in 2 hours 23 mins.

You know, I am using my Macs for Video stuff for nearly two years now, creating VCDs and SVCDs from various materials (DivX, Quicktimes, ASF etc.) and now I do that stuff for DVDs...but all my experience in these two years with Macs, PCs, VirtualPCs would lead me to the conclusion that even the 867 Mhz could never complete the tasks in such a short time! Normally, such performance is only delivered by expensive, hardware MPEG2 de/encoders, and the G4 has to do the stuff all with the software. Don't me wrong, the amount of time I stopped is from hitting the "build and burn DVD" button until holding the final DVD in my hands! So the entire burning process (2x speed, so 30 mins for a 60 min DVD) is included in those numbers.

HOW CAN THIS THING BE THAT FAST IN THESE TASKS?

I don't get it, other apps are far from beeing close to this performance (3D rendering, video authoring under Premiere and other processor intensive tasks) when beeing executed on the 867 Mhz model...what is Apple doing so different about their software???

[AdmiralAK]

No answer, but a question.
What do you use to view MPG2 (svcd) files ?
Also what do you use to make SVCDs ?

I am doing some video/audio editing and I can make and play VCDs (and mpgs) but I dont know of any apps that play SVCDs and I dont know what apps play MPG2 files (and I have A LOT of em).

Can you help me out here ?

Also, is there a program that makes/burns miniDVDs ? (CD movies probably in MPEG but they have menus like DVDs do)


Thanks

[ulrik]

I haven't been able to burn miniDVDs on the Mac yet. Watching MPEG2 video streams is possible with DVD Studio Pro in the Preview Mode. I am watching all my V and SVCDs with my standalone DVD player.

Authoring SVCDs on the Mac is not possible without VirtualPC. I used to create the M2V and M2A streams with TMEPGC and then you have to use a PC app called Fireburn IIRC to create a bin/cue from your muxed streams which you then can burn with Toast. Go to www.vcdhelper.com and search the forums (down for the next few hours due to database movement to another server) under Mac Video Creating. Somebody posted a very good tutorial on how to author SVCDs on the Mac. The quality is amazing. Near-DVD if you ask me (most cheap produced DVDs are SVCD quality anyway...just check the bitrates of some DVDs and you will laugh your ass off when you see for what you have paid 20 bucks or more)

BTW: The next Toast version is believed to have SVCD support like the current has VCD support, btw IMHO the best way to burn DivX to VCDs...it's such an incredible good quality! Get a good DivX and download the Mac DivX player. Doctor the DivX and predecode the audio (IMPORTANT!), leave the DivXPlayer open (even more important) and drop the predecoded and doctored DivX into Toast...voila, it will create a good looking VCD without the hassle to manually get sound in sync and stuff like that.

IIRC someone over at vcdhelper had a little bit of success in creating a miniDVD with DVD Studio Pro. He created the DVD image and somehow then managed to burn it, but he told that it still was not possible to navigate the miniDVD etc, IIRC the player recognized it but it refused to play it.

Anyway, if VCD stuff is your hobby, get a Quicksilver. I am serious. It's heaven's computer for this tasks!

[ulrik]

oh, and btw: if you want menus and subtitle streams, you do not necessarily need a miniDVD. SVCD and even VCD 3.0 can do this!!! (I have some original VCDs which have menus and subtitle streams!)

check vcdhelper, everything is explained there

[knighthawk]

The reason why the Quicksilver is so fast is because Apple is taking full advantage of the Velocity Engine. Motorola (the makers of the G4 chips) says that AltiVec (their name for Velocity Engine) is as powerful as a DSP chip but better because it is "programmable". You need to rewrite the code in your application to take advantage of the VE, and in fact the code is much longer and more complex than normal code. But once you design your application to take advantage of the VE, there is no stopping you. This relates to GigaFlops that Apple is always talking about. Gigaflops is the number of floating point calculations it can do in a second, and the way the VE is designed, it can handle up to 4 floating point calculations for every clock cycle.

Now you understand the claim that Apple has developed the first desktop super computer.

[byronw70]

Upon some looking about, I have found this player. You have to move the mpg files of of the VCD, but then they play fine at full screen etc. I repeat MPG2 video seems tobe fully playable with this



Check this link out

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download.html

The writer of the article that I read recommended that you install teh developer tools, compile videolan using the source, and run it from the command line. This is supposed to be better. I will try this (whe I figure out how to use them) using the source code. This may allow playback from the disk. As I needed a commercial DVD player for my PC to play these, I am pretty happy with this start. I hope that this helps out any other frustrated SVCD wanna players

If anyof you can post instructions on how to compile the code, so that I can have a crack at compiling the source, that would be gret. This hopefully could lead to the ability to play scvd's as svcd's as apposed to mpg2 files

[simX]

knighthawk is correct -- iDVD is so fast because of the Velocity Engine, and it particularly shines in this aspect. Apple trumpeted iDVD at MWSF '01 (when it released the Titanium Powerbook G4) because Apple acheived a SOFTWARE feat -- they brought down the encoding time from 25x to 2x, and in iDVD 2, they brought it down from 2x to 1x, even while encoding in the background. In short, it doesn't matter which sort of G4 you have, as long as you have a G4 to take advantage of the Velocity Engine that iDVD uses.