DVD Encoding

Paul C

Registered
When I use Toast Titanium to burn avi/mpg files to disc it takes forever, is their anyway I can get it to encode quicker? :mad:
 
Geez, don't beat around the bush ;)

I thought that might be the answer, so would I need like a G5 dual 2.5 to encode in decent time? cos at the moment it take about 10 hours to encode 60 min avi/mpg :(
 
10 hours _does_ seem like a bit much. Are there any MPEG tools on versiontracker.com that do it faster?
 
I would imagine that a commercial program such as Toast Titanium is well optimized enough.

When encoding video, 2 factors control the speed of encoding:

- CPU speed
- System bus speed

Your CPU seems decent, but it's running on a 133 MHz bus, so is your RAM. Moving that much data around requires a fast system bus.
 
Heh... 100MHz bus, actually.

And yeah, the bus speed has a LOT to do with encoding times, as does the processor speed.

Encoding one format into another format is not a trivial task for a computer, either. It's heavily processor and bandwidth dependent.

I'll have to agree with Lycander... a faster computer is pretty much the only way you can make it go faster, unless you replace that 1GHz processor with a faster one.
 
You could try using Final Cut Pro (not sure if Express encodes to MPEG-2). Or DVD Studio Pro. Both encode for DVD and are faster than Toast in my experience. Also, Toast has a horrible encoder. At least for me, I always have visible artifacting and even some glitches that cause discs to not play back properly. I would avoid Toast for DVD burning at this point unless it's truly a quick and dirty approach or something you don't care that much about. Admittedly, Toast is still the absolute easiest way to burn a DVD, even easier than iDVD.

I have found encoding times to be somewhere around twice real time for a single pass encode on a Dual G4 1 GHZ, 1 GIG ram. Or 4x real time for a two pass encode. So, on my box an hour long piece might take around two or four hours to encode. That's using higher quality settings. You can encode much faster by sacrificing quality, which you can change in either program.

Unfortunately, I don't think you can use just QuickTime pro to encode to MPEG-2.

You may want to try iDVD and see if it encodes faster. It's very possible. I have found Apple's applications to encode audio/video MUCH faster than other third party apps.
 
Here's a thought: dedicated encoding PCI cards. I've known people to put MPEG encoding cards into PVRs, I guess for a Mac it would just be a matter of drivers.

And it could be faster if the source was uncompressed. That way the encoder can just focus on re-encoding, instead of having to decode, then encode in the same work cycle.
 
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