MegaPEG.X Pro 2.0.4 Batch is now available. QT soon. Aside from the bug fixes documented on the support page, new in this version is the inclusion of two different binaries, one optimized for G5 and the other for G4. Currently we're seeing only a small speed increase by using the G5 version, but you have to understand that this first round of G5s represents the first time Apple has gone to someone other than Motorola for PowerPC manufacturing. So all the suggestions in Apple's G5 tuning notes may not come into play until a couple of chip revisions. We'll see. You should try them both on your hardware, G4 or G5 and use the faster one.

The bad news is that to make the product a better Aqua citizen took us out of faster than real-time encoding, regardless as to the frame/size/profile. More research is necessary. The good news is that the speed on the larger frame sizes went up by a whole factor. I reported that 720x480x24p was running at 3:1 on a PowerBook 1.2Ghz, but in the new version it actually is down around 2.1:1. This is on the 'Fast' setting and with no filtering. As well, when I do benchmarks, I try to avoid using a source movie format that is slow to source frames to the encoder, and believe me, there is a very wide range. And on the G5 we saw a big increase. Half-pel motion estimation with exhaustive search on IBBP (which is the equivalent of hardware encoding) is now running at about 5:1; one hour footage, five hours encoding time. That means even the slowest encoding jobs will run easily overnight for a 2hr piece, unless you're encoding sports at 29.97i (with field_prediction)- your mileage then will definitely vary. You'll only see encoding times this slow if you slide the Speed vs. Quality slider to the bottom two notches. Don't use the very bottom notch unless you are encoding interlaced material.