Not the one in the car, but the neat freeware for converting DVD into Mpg4. It's easy to use and works beautifully.

I'm using G4 Pbook, 1.5GHz, Mac OSX 10.4, 768MB and set the system for optimised performance. I downsized the DVD into 368x204 clips. Audio is fixed at 128kbps but varied the average bitrate. The few combinations i've tried were,

• Ave. bitrate 500 kbps with 2-pass encoding : excellent
• Ave. bitrate 500 kbps without 2-pass encoding : good
• Ave. bitrate 400 kbps with 2-pass encoding : good
• Ave. bitrate 400 kbps without 2-pass encoding : ok
• Ave. bitrate 300 kbps with 2-pass encoding : no good
• Ave. bitrate 300 kbps without 2-pass encoding - major pixelisation

Perhaps it's my system, but i only managed to get about 14 fps on average during conversion even with no other programs running in the background.

With 2-pass encoding, the time required is doubled, typically to around 1 hr for evey 10 mins of video. But comparing the difference i rather stick with the 2-pass. Visible improvement.

Dropping bitrate to anything below 350 kbps will be a waste of time. That is, unless the show doesn't contain any high action scenes. I've tested with one of the CSI episode, and ended up with big chunky blocks during the fast scenes.

Using 500 kbps & 2-pass, the resulting file size is 200MB for a 43 min show and took 4 hrs to encode. Think i'll be ripping my entire DVD collection (which isn't much) into Mpg4. Great for backups and it beats carrying all that DVDs when travelling.

Labels: Tech