Why are macs (or my mini at least) so SLOW at encoding video???

[notjustjay]

The other thing I would ask you to try is to play the resulting DVD from both the Mac and the PC. Is the quality the same?

Maybe the Mac took longer (UB vs Rosetta notwithstanding) because it did a higher quality encoding?

 

[Josias]

My 2.0 GHz MacBook with 1 GB RAM and 60 GB HDD took only 15 minutes to convert a 700 MB .avi file to MP4...

 

[dpaanlka]

As it turns out it was in rosetta, as I hadn't upgraded to the UB version of toast. That upgrade did cut the encode time almost in half.

After thinking more about this... it is very strange that a PowerPC version of Toast would have anything to do with this, because most video apps on a Mac would simply be a front to QuickTime, which is always optimized.

This must mean that Toast is using their own encoding algorithms instead of the Apple optimized QuickTime 7 ones, which probably means that regardless if it's UB or not, its going to be slower than if you used an Apple-branded product to encode your video such as iMovie, iDVD, or QuickTime Pro.

Worth a thought... try an Apple program instead.