Swtiching to mac

[Fischerbot]

Since a few days my old computer is broken and the machine is really not worth to be repaired. And so I was thinking about switching to Macintosh. The only problem which is bordering me is that I have never heard a lot about encoding DVDs on a Mac, or even if there are programs to do it. Does somebody have some links to get some information? And what do you think about Macintosh and encoding?:confused:

[pacohaas]

First, I assume you mean "encoding DVD's" to other formats rather than encoding and burning an actual DVD (DVD-R style), though 3ivx forums is probably a good place to start looking for that info as well.

3ivx.com forums have become quite the place to get such knowledge. I haven't visited them in a while, but it's certainly a good place to start.

Divx.com recently released 5.0.7 for macs which finally fixes the audio sync issues commonly found in AVI's on macs.

It's possible, for sure, but hopefully you're up for a challenge because the tools are pretty few and far between compared to the PC world.

[avih]

the bundled iMovie should do the trick i think. it comes with OS/X, and ppl say it's more than enough for editing/conversions tasks. never used it myself though...

[Fischerbot]

well, i am just thingking about it. I have searched a little bit around and I could not really find much. We will see, haven't got money anyway.

But thanks very much for the hints.

thomas

[Tantabootsy]

What I've heard about Mac that it's preferred in the graphics section, there it's fast, has a good color managment and so on. So it's bought by webdesigners and advertising designers in general. Macs processors are especially made for graphics and so on but not so good for any other stuff, whereas PCs are more the "allround" computers, but can't beat the Macs in the graphics section.

[Fischerbot]

I heard about that too. And I work regularly on a CAD in graphic design, so it wouldn’t be too bad to switch to a Mac. Another good reason is that you get with a student license a lot of Mac-Software cheaper. I have a friend who is a Mac freak and he told me that he doesn’t own any illegal software because there is already (iTunes for music, iMovie for video, iPhoto for photo, Mail and Safari internet) a lot of good software on it.
The only reason I don’t want to buy a Mac is that they are so expensive! For a G5 1.6 you pay 2000 dollars (and if you look on the apple homepage how much faster the G5 is against the P4, you can see that all the tests are made with the Dual 2GHz G5, and I don’t think I want to pay another 1000 dollar for the world fastest personal computer).

At the end I think it is just a matter of taste.

[Doom9]

there are student licenses for PC software, too ;)

I think one tool you definitely want to check out on the mac is ffmpegX, afaik it's a pretty versatile transcoder.

[TactX]

Also make sure to have a look at mplayer ported to OS X (http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/). You can get binaries for mplayer and mencoder which ist the fastest CLI encoder available for Linux and *BSD.

[Fischerbot]

I checked out ffmpegX, and i have to say it looks pretty good. You probably can't do as much as with programs on a windows platform but that can change over the next few years.
I was reading a few reviews on the owners’ homepage and i saw that ffmpegx is about the only tool out there. Except for the 42, which is unfortunately one of those "insert DVD, click on button, and Divx finished". And I don't really like those kinds of tools.


To Doom9

Have you used the tool? If yes, what do you think about it?

[midiguy]

alternatively, you can run a pc emulator and be able to run windows on your mac platform (although expect some slow down). You might want to encode using your windows emulator and playback your files using your regular mac operating system.

[pacohaas]

Originally posted by Fischerbot
I checked out ffmpegX, and i have to say it looks pretty good. You probably can't do as much as with programs on a windows platform but that can change over the next few years.
I was reading a few reviews on the owners’ homepage and i saw that ffmpegx is about the only tool out there. Except for the 42, which is unfortunately one of those "insert DVD, click on button, and Divx finished". And I don't really like those kinds of tools.


To Doom9

Have you used the tool? If yes, what do you think about it? I have used ffmpeg, but not the frontend ffmpegX. There's a lot of options and configurations and I think that if you are ready to dive into the task of learning a new utility, then this is definitely the one to go for as it is very flexible. There are also many tools linked from the 3ivx forum that I mentioned. You have separate audio tools, video, etc. So there are definitely choices out there, just not as many as on the PC. I really like the MacOSX command-line for the audio conversions because since it's *nix, you can pipe output | input, going from .vob to normalized mp* much as BeSweet is able to do. I was able to compile SSRC on my iMac by just changing one #define at the top that tells whether the system is bigendian or not. Personally, i like having my mac around for other purposes, but toying with video conversion is certainly a fun hobby as well. I say go for it, and good luck!