Encoding DVD

Paul C

Paul C

Registered
I have just bought an Sonnet 1ghz upgrade for my powermac as since I've bought a DVD writer I'm getting annoyed the way it takes hours and hours to encode DVD, my friend has a 3ghz P4 PC and it only takes him 15 mins to encode 1 hour or video from his Digi Camcorder but it takes about 3 hours on mine.

To cut a long question short what sort of time will I be looking for roughly an hours worth of video with the spec in my sig?
 
It's certainly not an exact science, but a machine similar to a Dual G4 1 GHZ used to be the becnhmark for a 2X encode rate (meaning it takes twice as long as real time to encode in this case). So an hour video would take two hours to encode on a dual G4 1 GHZ (give or take).

Now that's not factoring in compression settings (one pass v. two pass, bit rate, quality, Apple v. Bitvice (or other encoder), etc.

Three hours on a 1 GHZ Sonnett in an older box doesn't sound far off unfortunately.

15 mins is mighty fast. I'd be surprised if that was pro-pevel encoding and multi-pass. (Not that Apple's mpeg-2 encoder is particularly high end. It's not.)
 
Copying or burning a one hour DVD in 15 minutes is about right assuming a 4x DVD burner and 4x DVD-R media. With a 2x DVD burner or with 2x media on a 4x burner Copying or burning should take about 30 minutes. Burning a full data DVD on a 2x burner with 2x media will take at least 30 minutes and there is no encoding or rendering required at all. There is no hardware or software magic for PCs or Macs that will change those numbers until someone builds a faster DVD burner and is able to reliably produce faster DVD-R media.

Encoding or rendering and then burning a on hour DVD is an entirely different matter. The length of time that would take depends on many factors including:
  • The software you are using
  • The speed of your CPU
  • How much RAM you have
  • The speed of your HD
  • The speed of your DVD burner
  • The speed of your media
  • Free space on the hard drive and is it badly fragmented
  • The final resolution
  • The complexity of the source material
  • etc.

All I can figure about your PC burned DVDs is
  • There was a lot less than one hour of content on the DVD
  • The data was previously encoded and all that was happening was burning the image to the DVD and they had a 4x burner and 4x media. (4x burners are easier to find than 4x media)
 
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