I am a long time Mac user, ten years or so. I'm interested in encoding video on the Mac, and I've looked at some of the apps mentioned here. However, none of them seem to work as well as the comparable apps on the PC.

Now, I'm not interested in or intending to spark flames here, so please just let me finish my thoughts before anyone jumps on me.

I have an .mpg that I converted using TMPGEnc and out of which I created a VCD using Nero. It worked fine, no problems, then played very well on my stand-alone DVD player.

I take the exact same .mpg file, copied via Samba, and try to create a VCD using Toast 5.2.1, and I get errors. Something about the file not being a valid .mpg file and that I should convert it again. Whatever.

If I tried to use ffmpegx to create the valid .mpg it would take forever. When I encoded the .mpg on the PC, it only took 45 minutes, and it gave me very good quality video.

So, after all this, why is there such a disparity between the Mac and the PC? As I said, I'm not trying to incite a riot here. I'm simply trying to understand the process.

For what it's worth, and before anyone brings it up, I will be losing my PC soon. It's my work laptop, and I'm changing companies and will, therefore, have to relinquish my laptop. So I'll be attempting this video stuff on my Mac only.

I appreciate any thoughts.

Thanks,
mrb