I must RANT!

[cleekj]

grrrrrrr

Begin rant


iFeatures........

iFeature is a word I made up to describe what is a really neat idea but it gets beaten in to useless by the mind numbingly control everything mind set of Apple

Choice is bad according to Apple it will just confuse the end user. Apple knows best. Good thing they have total control over the Mac platform so they can lock out those pesky free thinkers that might give Mac users a choice

Take iDVD for example, ever look for DVD authoring software for the Mac that is not iDVD or DVD studio pro?

ALL DVDs are encoded in mpeg 2 if you make a snazzy DVD in iDVD it is mpeg2, if you buy s store bought DVD it is in mpeg 2 ALL DVD's are in mpeg 2

but guess what formats iDVD supports...... quick time of course and DV

note the lack of mpeg 2 in the much too short list

to get mpeg 2 support you have to fork out $400 for DVD studio pro

unless of course you happen to own a PC and for $108 (ADS instant DVD 2.0+ulead video studio which comes bundled) you can make DVDs and work with mpeg 2 files, thus saving days of time spent encoding your ripped mpeg 2 file to quick time to import in to iDVD and having iDVD turn right around and burning it on a DVD in mpeg 2 format. Video Studio 7.0 SE (SE= has to be crippled some how but still manages to be light years better than iDVD) handles mpeg 1 & 2 as well as AVI xvid and wait for it QUICKTIME! no WMV though but it is easy enough to go from WMV to XVID and maintain image quality and about the same file size

It is simply more logical to work with the eventual format you are going to (use if possible), but Apple knows best, luckily I have a PC as well as a Mac and I can decide for my self what is best for me given that I know what I want to do which is rip recored TV shows off my DVR (and VCR) and make nice pretty DVD's of them so can play in my DVD player with snazzy DVD menus. I am by no means even an amateur digital production person (nor do I pretend to be), but yet I find my self "out grown" Apples' stupid little "do it our way" programs

Did I also mention quality degrades the more times you convert formats?

Why do I rag on this? because according to the latest propaganda (new Apple commercials) iLife is a feature part of Mac's that not available in a stock Windows install

I will give that to Apple, but again I find it is not only cheaper but faster and easier to do things on my PC, because I have a much greater range of choices.

OS X is a really great OS, I find I use it for everything but games and sadly now video encoding what very very little I do of it

OS X good
Apple bad

quick time needs to disappear and never be remembered its worse than real player charging $20 to play full screen videos.......

end rant

does anyone know of DVD authoring software for the Mac that will work with formats other than quick time and DV that is NOT $400?

[Din]

Quicktime is more of a container, not a codec. A quicktime file can be MPEG2. So in theory, you should be able to make a plain vanilla MPEG2 into a quicktime file without transcoding and the associated generational quality loss.

Won't ffmpegx do this?

[warlock]

I think Apple chose DV because it's the most widely used pro-sumer format..I don't know anyone who uses formats such as Digital 8. Like iPods are formatted for PCs..there's more of them out there.
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i hate wearing trousers in public!!!

[Din]

Well, I guess ffmpegX does NOT do this.

This does:

http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Video/mpeg2dec.shtml

But I am not sure if it transcodes when doing it.