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Scotty,

Thanks again for your prompt response. As you should already know, I will be purchasing a new computer for video recording and editing. An interesting thing occurred this weekend, and I would like your thoughts on it.

I needed 3 movies, burned to a single DVD, that resided on a Vista machine. They were recorded using a Sony HD camcorder, and were loaded onto the Vista as MPG files. They were then burned to DVDs as MPG files. However, when I went to load them onto my Mac, it said that the files were not movie files. They would not load onto the MacBook Pro (Intel), nor the Powerbook G4. THey also would not load onto 2 separate DVD players, or a Blu Ray player, all of different ages.

The question is a simple on, but I wanted to give you the background if needed.

Anyway, after beating my head against the wall, it was determined that the only place the movies (that said they were not movie files) would play was on a Windows machine, in Windows Media Player. Quick Time and iTunes were unsuccessful in opening them as well, on these PCs. I then went to 2 other people who are so called PC experts, and told them my dilemma, and asked for their help.

OK, in reality I threw down the gauntlet, and told them that they were not allowed to say a disparaging word against Macs, unless they could take the original movie files, or any other movie files, and get them to play on the DVD player, underneath the PC. They tried and tried, and could not do it.

During the church service, I did my research, found a few things, and ended up downloading Handbrake. Handbrake was able to convert these files into mp4v, or something like that. I then loaded them into iDVD, assembled the movie, and burned it to a DVD.

To get the movie package to burn, and fit onto a single DVD, I chose High Quality, or the middle setting, which encoded the videos. Handbrake took about 15 minutes per gig to convert, which took about an hour, but iDVD took over 7 hours to burn this one DVD. I had my Activity Monitor open, and it was maxed the entire time.

The DVD finished the net morning, and it played in the Blu Ray and DVD players. I went to make another copy, and that took only 35 minutes. So my question is this, what do I need to speed this process along?

My MacBook Pro is an Intel Core 2 Duo, with 4GB of Ram, 800 MHz Bus, 2.5 GHz Processor. I also had over 120 GB free, out of 230GB.

Is it the processor, Ram, Bus Speed, or what? I now that in the future, I will save the movie in such a way that will keep me from having to encode it again, but I just want to know what is most important when getting a new computer for video.

I thought you would like to have a little chuckle about the Vista computer. It is going to be fun showing up with a DVD that will play, and the 2 PC guys will still be scratching their heads.

____________

Great job solving your issue. Handbrake is great. As you may know, just because video is burned onto a dvd doesn’t mean it’s playable on a dvd player. In order for a DVD player to understand what it’s reading, the file must undergo the process of encoding as mpeg 2s I believe. I think that’s the defualt format for DVD video. In other words, a piece of software like iDVD or Popcorn (Roxio) will do the translation for you whereas Handbrake will do the conversion only. If handbrake was enabled to do both then it would be breaking the law.

So essentially what you had were dvd disks with raw data files on them. No file map or menu structure. Some DVD players can play raw files but the interface to get to them within the disk is very confusing and should not be relied on as a normal means to view video.

The initial burn to disk also created a disk image which can be copied to a new dvd without going through the encoding process again. There are a few factors that come in to play to reduce the time at hand. All of the variables you mentioned come into play ex: ram, processor speed, bus speed, disc burning speed, quality of video chosen. And you may want to play around with different combinations to find the combo that works best for you.

Overall, lowering quality helps a lot but most people don’t want to do that so the next best thing is as much horsepower as possible. This exact task is what separates the men from the boys when it comes to purchasing a Mac Pro workstation with several cores vs. a MacBook pro, taking into consideration that your encoding program is mutlithreaded.

So, processor power is the biggest effector here. Of course as much ram as you can fit in the machine is great but only to a degree when it comes to video encoding. 4 gigs is plenty for now on that. You can purchase external burners that burn a faster speeds but that’s not nearly as time consuming as the extraction process. Consider that every second of video is 24 frames and each of those frames is now in HD. That equals a lot of zeros and ones being chewed up and spit out.



By the way, sony has a habit of making their video devices record in mpeg 2 I believe, therefore making it unnessasarily difficult to play in a defualt player like quicktime. Usually the video is present but no audio. By downloading a codec for quicktime you can usually fix this issue quickly but overall I like to avoid sony handhelds. They love to take the long road.

Hope this helps.
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