MP4 AVC encoding on 3.06 iMac

[PM Smith]

Hello all.

I am moving to a Mac as I am totally fed up with the whole windows vista experience, and plan to buy a 24in 3.06ghz iMac soon. I had a Mac IIsi in the early 1990s and loved it, but, due to financial/work considerations I had to move back to a PC.

My query is, how does the iMac handle MP2 to MP4 AVC encoding? On the PC I have used Nero Recode 3 to encode lots of Tv recordings and have been happy with the results and the speed of the program (almost realtime for 2-pass encoding on a 2.4ghz quad-core PC, with files emerging roughly one third of their original size and no real discernable difference in quality). I may install windows on my new Mac and continue to use Nero, but I would prefer to do things totally in the Mac realm. Does anyone have any experience of this type of work on the iMac in question? What programme should I use? Would Turbo264 make much of a difference?

Thanks in advance

 

[ceres]

Hello all.

I am moving to a Mac as I am totally fed up with the whole windows vista experience, and plan to buy a 24in 3.06ghz iMac soon. I had a Mac IIsi in the early 1990s and loved it, but, due to financial/work considerations I had to move back to a PC.

My query is, how does the iMac handle MP2 to MP4 AVC encoding? On the PC I have used Nero Recode 3 to encode lots of Tv recordings and have been happy with the results and the speed of the program (almost realtime for 2-pass encoding on a 2.4ghz quad-core PC, with files emerging roughly one third of their original size and no real discernable difference in quality). I may install windows on my new Mac and continue to use Nero, but I would prefer to do things totally in the Mac realm. Does anyone have any experience of this type of work on the iMac in question? What programme should I use? Would Turbo264 make much of a difference?

Thanks in advance

I really like recode´s gui and simplicity. However, I am not that convinced with its results when compared to the latest x264 installments. However, it´s fine in its own right. As longs as you stick to mp2 to avc encoding, I´d go for handbrake although the programm sometime crashes and hasn´t been updated in a while. Visualhub will also do. However, if you should move on to let´s say blu ray recoding a dual core system won´t do.
I currently run a penryn quad core system oced to 3.6 ghz and a 12mbit blu ray stream, some denoising and adding borders so that it can be output as an avchd disk for my ps3, takes roughly 4 hours to complete using ripbot 264 or megui. Most of the time I am running all cores at 100% load. Doing that on the slower iMac would take 8-10 hours. Keep in mind that AVC and Blu Ray Editing is happening in Windows right now. Some of that stuff such as MEgui and so forth won´t ever come to os x bc there are no avi script editors or frame servers / media splitters on the mac that will do. If you want to enjoy or manipulate hd video you should hang onto your pc or save for a Mac Pro.
The next single cpu Nehalem Mac Pro might be worth a look as well.
Alternatively, keep your pc and get a lower spec Mac Notebook for all the casual stuff. What I am saying is that the price for HD Gear has been coming down to a level where SD doesn´t make much sense any longer. I´d focus on that.

 

[PM Smith]

Thanks Ceres. I'm not doing much HD stuff yet, nearly all SD TV programmes, with the odd bit of 1080i from my Canon HG10. I've run Nero recode 3 on a 2.0 dual core notebook PC and it was pretty fast, so it should be even better on a 3.06 dual core system. I may just end up putting windows and Nero on the iMac and running things that way. Would have preferred a decent Mac way though rather than messing about with windows again. I've encoded some 1080i HD programmes using Nero on my quad core PC and it took a similar amount of time as you describe.