I've had Tiger for the better part of the week, but I've just now gotten around to seeing what Quicktime 7.0 is made of. I got the pro version yesterday and also, Handbrake, a really good DVD ripping program, went Tiger compatible yesterday. I needed to rip a copy of my DVD for The Motorcycle Diaries to my comp for an assignment, so I thought I would try using x264 codec to incode the file as an Mpeg4 H.n264 and AAC, all of this on my 1.6ghz Power Mac G5.
The result?... Still waiting. I'm done my first pass, which took all night, and now there are a few hours remaining on my second pass. I've been averageing a little under 5fps, and this is with no apps running and handbrake minimized most of the time and all background processes turned off.
I was expecting to get a low fps encode, but this is simply slow. I can normally encode with divX and similar codecs at 20 + fps, so this is a big hit. I'm hoping the quality is worth it, as I'm leaving the file as 1.25 gigs and hope to see (near) DVD quality for that size.
In a few hours when all is done I will report back with my analysis of the quality of the final file. In the meantime, something has become readily apparent to me: if Apple expects H.264 to take off the same way that AAC has, they will have to provide an external machine for encoding it. It's as simple as that. There is no way most people will be ripping H.264 anytime soon unless they either have (A), Xserves running full throttle to do so, or (B), some kind of set-top box, designed by Apple, that is dedicated to ripping the format. Rumors have said that Apple would use a Cell processor in a machine like this, but that seems very far out to me. Who know: maybe Sony will release their own machine for ripping H.264 (for an exhorbitant price, of course)... after all, aren't they using the format for Bluray?
The result?... Still waiting. I'm done my first pass, which took all night, and now there are a few hours remaining on my second pass. I've been averageing a little under 5fps, and this is with no apps running and handbrake minimized most of the time and all background processes turned off.
I was expecting to get a low fps encode, but this is simply slow. I can normally encode with divX and similar codecs at 20 + fps, so this is a big hit. I'm hoping the quality is worth it, as I'm leaving the file as 1.25 gigs and hope to see (near) DVD quality for that size.
In a few hours when all is done I will report back with my analysis of the quality of the final file. In the meantime, something has become readily apparent to me: if Apple expects H.264 to take off the same way that AAC has, they will have to provide an external machine for encoding it. It's as simple as that. There is no way most people will be ripping H.264 anytime soon unless they either have (A), Xserves running full throttle to do so, or (B), some kind of set-top box, designed by Apple, that is dedicated to ripping the format. Rumors have said that Apple would use a Cell processor in a machine like this, but that seems very far out to me. Who know: maybe Sony will release their own machine for ripping H.264 (for an exhorbitant price, of course)... after all, aren't they using the format for Bluray?
