Converting AVI's for Frontrow w/o sacrificing quality

[livingfortoday]

Hi everybody. A while back I had ripped a lot of my DVD's of TV shows onto my external hard drive so I could watch them on my Mac. Problem is, now that I have an Intel Mac, I want to convert them to a format that's useable with FrontRow.

I've been using ffmpegx to convert the files to .mov files, and setting them at "best" quality, but the video quality always degrades considerably. I'm currently trying to convert one file to H.264 format to see if the quality stays the same, but it takes sooooo long on my Core Solo Mini.

Does anyone have any good advice about making .avi files playable through FrontRow in a way that won't decrease quality of the file OR take three years for my Mini to convert?

Alternately, I still have an Athlon 64 PC here for the next few days, and it could crunch some files as well (probably faster, too), can anyone recommend a similar program to whatever Mac program you recommend?

Thanks!

 

[XIII]

Hi everybody. A while back I had ripped a lot of my DVD's of TV shows onto my external hard drive so I could watch them on my Mac. Problem is, now that I have an Intel Mac, I want to convert them to a format that's useable with FrontRow.

I've been using ffmpegx to convert the files to .mov files, and setting them at "best" quality, but the video quality always degrades considerably. I'm currently trying to convert one file to H.264 format to see if the quality stays the same, but it takes sooooo long on my Core Solo Mini.

Does anyone have any good advice about making .avi files playable through FrontRow in a way that won't decrease quality of the file OR take three years for my Mini to convert?

Alternately, I still have an Athlon 64 PC here for the next few days, and it could crunch some files as well (probably faster, too), can anyone recommend a similar program to whatever Mac program you recommend?

Thanks!

You can install a couple of codecs that will make them all play in QuickTime, and therefore Front Row. DivX and Xvid you will need, I am geussing..

 

[livingfortoday]

You can install a couple of codecs that will make them all play in QuickTime, and therefore Front Row. DivX and Xvid you will need, I am geussing..

Well, I tried getting the XVid codec and Divx as well, rebooted, and Quicktime still can't play 'em. Hmm. I wish I remembered what I had used to rip these originally, as it was a while back. Maybe I should just re-rip using Handbrake or something...

 

[livingfortoday]

Ok, I got the beta version of the Divx codec, and that's enabled Quicktime to read my .avi files. Sweet! Thanks for your help.