iDVD encoding, single core only?

[cluthz]

I've edited some footage and decided to burn it out with iDVD and making some nice menues and slideshows and so forth.
The total content for the DVD is around 88 minutes and when i start encoding it says it will take nearly 5 hours! Now about 30 minutes later it still says 4 hours and 17 minutes.

I'm checking Activity monitor and iDVD uses around 50-60% CPU, of a maximum of 400% (quad core), it uses a total of 1/8th of the available power i have here!

I read some people said that it only renders to main HD, so I have to have enough space there, which I have and it's a Vertex 3 SSD too, so it should be plenty fast. I also have 16GB RAM and iDVD seems to be happy with just 300 MB.

I've done a lot of video work earlier, and this kinda reminds me of when I did edit videos on my G4/450MHz with 1GB RAM back ten years ago, then I remember you left videos overnight rendering.

[thejadedmonkey]

I don't think iDVD has been updated since dual core was the fastest you could get, it makes sense if its single core only.

[cluthz]

Originally Posted by thejadedmonkey

I don't think iDVD has been updated since dual core was the fastest you could get, it makes sense if its single core only.

An hour out, just after encoding my slideshows, the CPU usage jumped to 200%, so it seems that maybe the slideshow module only did single core, but now it jumps from 180-210% (I doubt it's going more than two cores, but activitymonitor ain't always 100% correct).

It seems that the estimated time dropped alot now, but it will still take around 3-3,5hrs to encode a DVD.

Is the any alternative for a pretty lightweight DVD authoring software like iDVD that will take advantage of multiple cores?
I have probably 20-30 old VHS tapes I'm getting digitally restored and want to make DVDs of all of them, so I'm willing to pay up for something that possibly can give me 50 hours less encoding time!

[cluthz]

Great news it finally seemed like iDVD wanted to use some of my power, the estimate was way off and the encoding just ended now.

It seems it wasn't so bad after all!
Once the second part started and it used 2 cores fully it really went very much faster than the estimate and it finished up in like half an hour.

I guess I grew impatient while watching the machine encoding with crazy long estimates when I thought it should be done in minutes, those whole process took two hours, and not 5 hours as it estimated from the start (and it kinda followed that schedule for 1-1.5 hours then finally started to utilize (some) of the power available.

Seeing i now use roughly 2 hours pr video and not 5, I will use 60-90 hours less on rendering that I thought i had too, so I guess I can stick with iDVD after all.

Thanks for the replies tho!