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cjmal

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 25, 2007
305
3
I've really tried to refrain from making any posts about asking what to buy, does the Macbook do this or that, since most of the questions I was curious about have been answered on other threads. There is one thing I didn't find an answer to. Is a Macbook (c2d, 2gb ram) be able to handle the encoding of a full length movie to iPod format using handbrake, etc.? And just while I'm at it, how's iTunes/coverflow run on it?
 
I've really tried to refrain from making any posts about asking what to buy, does the Macbook do this or that, since most of the questions I was curious about have been answered on other threads. There is one thing I didn't find an answer to. Is a Macbook be able to handle the encoding of a full length movie to iPod format using handbrake, etc.?

Uhh... define not being able to handle.
 
Encoding movies has nothing to do with the graphics card, it sjust CPU intensive. So the MB will only be a little bit slower than the MBP becuase of the difference in clockspeedm but it will still be able to do it and be quite fast.
 
If my 500MHz G4 tower can handle HandBrake (although slowly at ~3 hrs for conversion), I fully expect the MacBook to exceed your expectations.

(Havent tried it on my 500MHz PowerBook yet, due to a bad Disk drive, but if you'd like I'll give it a shot and tell you what it quotes me for a time.)
 
I have a first generation MacBook 1.83, not even a Core "2" Duo and it handles it not just adequately but exceptionally well. I can rip a DVD in 20 or 30 minutes. I imagine the newer chips do it even faster and more effeciently.

No they don't overheat, the fan turns on because the CPU's are peaked and crunching through the rip but the fan's aren't even that loud. Battery life doesn't take as much of a hit as I thought it would either, I can rip several DVD's on battery alone at full speed and still have plenty of juice left over.

And it's Mac OS X, it doesn't crash. :) At least mine doesn't. I love this computer.
 
I've really tried to refrain from making any posts about asking what to buy, does the Macbook do this or that, since most of the questions I was curious about have been answered on other threads. There is one thing I didn't find an answer to. Is a Macbook (c2d, 2gb ram) be able to handle the encoding of a full length movie to iPod format using handbrake, etc.? And just while I'm at it, how's iTunes/coverflow run on it?

MBP C2D 2.16 runs about 30fps+ on mediafork doing h.264 full sized 640x480 encodes and over twice that speed on 320x240 encoding. It takes between 3-4 hrs for a 2hr movie for 2pass encoding.

Yes, it gets hot but nothing that a lapdesk can't solve.
 
If my 500MHz G4 tower can handle HandBrake (although slowly at ~3 hrs for conversion), I fully expect the MacBook to exceed your expectations.

I feel like I'm doing something wrong... 2 hour movies take 5-6 hours in Instant Handbrake on my iMac G5 / 2.0 / 1.5GB of memory... they should be a lot faster than that, shouldn't they? I should be doing at least as well as you are....
 
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