[Ben Waggoner]

Bear in mind that Compressor 2 uses the same encoder as DVD Studio Pro 4 itself. I’ve moved to just letting DVDSP 2 handle the video compression, since I can more easily tweak things, and set I-frames. I only use Compressor 2 for AC-3.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

I’ll third Compression Master. It’s really an invaluable tool for mobile encoding. it handles 3GPP with MPEG-4 part 2 and H.264, WMV, RealMedia, etcetera. Well worth buying a Mac for if you’re doing a lot of mobile work.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

A dual G5 can convert from DV to MPEG-2 faster than real-time, so you should be able to get to the speed you need.

Most of the hardware direct-to-DVD encoders I’ve seen have been pretty lousy in terms of quality. I like the control of being able to tweak the settings to get it right, and especially to handle 2-pass encoding.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

On the specific point of multi-bitrate encoding, Compression Master 3.1 is the only Mac tool that can encode to “Intelligent Streaming” so far.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

The newly updated “Breaking News” link for Compressor 2 has some useful comments on HD to SD transcoding as well.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

Well, DV doesn’t really have a fully native 24p mode. Maybe you were making a 24p Advanced DV, or with 3:2 pulldown.

You’re better off using a different codec for the intermediate that supports arbitrary frame rates, like Huffyuv.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

For more general use, I like Camtasia Studio for capturing on Windows. It takes less CPU when running that Adobe Media Encoder, and supports export to WMV and many other formats.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

Well, I wrote a book, linked below in my .sig.

I don’t know of any good, free tutorials out there right now.

There are plenty of tutorials for particular products, but nothing that’s general.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

I think VLC might also be able to read IV50, and export to any of the formats it supports.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

Bear in mind that Photo-JPEG is great for progressive scan content, but doesn’t have native support for fields. Motion JPEG is what you want for interlaced video. And if you have rendered RGB graphics, PNG is often smaller than either JPEG codecs, and is always lossless.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html