I created a diagram to accompany todays post, I hope you find it useful and it should also serve to summarise the post’s information in a quick manor.

For the long trip down here and any other passages of isolated boredom that may strike I figured some movies may come in handy. Playing DVD’s is quite a battery drain, partly because of the power being used by the optical drive, and I think also because the low compression of a dvd’s video is a fair amount of data that has to be wizzed around the machine’s guts. So I downloaded Handbrake which is a really easy to use dvd compression/converter app, its easier and more straight forward than I think any of the free ones on the pc were, that i had used before.

I first tried converting the dvd’s to 1000kbit H.264, but unexpectedly when I tried it later on the iBook, even with the standard definition of a DVD movie it struggled to play it back, pausing here and there to take a breath. Which is a shame because they really did look almost identical to the original. So I did them in xvid instead, which isn’t too shabby anyway, except in the odd fast moving scene where xvids tend to look grubby.

I encoded them on the iMac and it really is silly fast, came as quite a shock actually. Handbrake does the whole thing in one pass, it doesn’t even have to dump the dvd’s contents on the HD first, does it all in one go. And managed to encode xvids at an average of 34 FPS, with PAL films being 25FPS thats much higher than real time! Probably even more incredible it encoded h.264 at about 24FPS. Crikey.