BitVice, Digigami or Main Concept mpeg2 encoder?

[Mike Smith]

Why not try out the demo versions?

I have a version of MainConcept, which is OK, and an old version of Digigami which I found excellent and relied on for a while. It was a little buggy but produced good quality; newer versions may have ironed out the bugs. Reports are that Bitvice produces excellent results but is very slow. At present I use Cinemacraft on PC, which produces very good quality and is speedy.

[Jason King2]

Thanks for the response, seeing I don’t have a pc at this point, I think I am going to opt for BitVice since it is now optimized for the Quad G5 and their indicating their pro version will be realtime. But I am going to first demo as you suggested.

Thanks
Jason

[Alexander Gao]

wow… realtime sounds pretty darn impressive

[Daniel_l]

Realtime…….To be announced, not yet available.

Video AllSorts

[Scottieb]

BitVice can be very fast or very slow…

To explain – it has some very impressive features, especially the Dynamic Video Noise Cancelling – which allow for very high quality at somewhat low bitrates. It will allow you to get 2 hours or more on a DVD-R without much sacrifice in quality. But what you DO sacrifice is encoding time. The DVNC looks really great, but it take a LOOOONNNGG time to process. It is up to you whether it is worth the tradeoff.

Also, the FIRST pass runs in realtime (or near realtime) – even with DVNC turned on. It is the second pass that slows you down. Without any special features turned on, it encodes pretty fast (comparable to compressor) with very good quality. But with the features turned on, you can get AWESOME results, but at the cost of encoding time.

Personally, I’d go with BitVice, but don’t be fooled by the real time thing – at least not yet!

[Jason King2]

The realtime thing is only indicated for their pro version which is not even out yet and I was assuming there may be a catch to this even when it does come out. I am willing sacrifice the time if you can achieve good results, because the quality in compressor for the most part has always sucked.

[Ben Waggoner]

Oh, good real-time MPEG-2 encoding is definitely possible – ProCoder is faster than realtime for 1-pass VBR on my XP box (although 2-pass Mastering Mode is more like 1/3rd real-time).

There really aren’t any great MPEG-2 enoder on Mac. I like ProCoder for when I’m only doing 2-pass encoding, and CinemaCraft if I really need to tweak a file segment-by-segment.

[Rich Carroll]

We use CM now and I think it’s amazing. The quality is WAY better than Compressor and it’s about 4 times faster on our machines (Dual 2.5). For the most part it runs at 2 Xs realtime.