Your information is mostly useless as that was the state of affairs at least a year ago.

Use HandBrake to encode. HandBrake is an app that originally debuted on BeOS ;)
http://handbrake.m0k.org/
The quality is very nice, the rip speed is decent when not using XviD (about 3 hours on my powerbook 1.25ghz), it has VERY cool graphical cropping and scaling tools (use them! the uncropped area wastes data), and you can specify the final file size you want (be sure to specify a size about 10MB less, like 690... the calculation seems slightly off). You can also encode up to 2 audio tracks. More features are forthcoming, it is in active development- but right now, this is fantastic to allow me to view movies on the road on my Powerbook.

And use VLC to play, forget mplayer.
http://www.videolan.org/

Wash, rinse, repeat.

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In /dev/null, no one can hear you scream

Wow! I can't believe it took me this long to find HandBrake... EXACTLY the piece of software I was looking for (not hard enough, as it turns out).

Question for the people who have been using HandBrake for a while: what settings do you use and what are your results? I've tried the FFMPEG setting at 768 & 1024 kbps (1-pass encoding) and found the results hard to distinguish from eachother. I was expecting the 768 one to look pretty bad.

What are your experiences with 2-pass encoding? Does it make a difference?

I found the speed on my 1.8Ghz G5 (single) a bit disappointing (but acceptable): the average framerate of the encoding is around 13 (meaning the encoding takes about twice as long as the movie). What are your experiens with the encoding speed?

Thanks beforehand,



Daniel Baars