In the time that elapsed between version 0.993 and version 1.0 of MoviesForMyPod/PSP, I did a lot of thinking about conversion times and performance. I also was intrigued by the various complaints about the quality of Apple's MPEG-4 encoder posted on various message boards around the internet. By exploiting the multi-processing architecture of "Mac OS X" and making some configuration changes to the way we call Apple's MPEG-4 video encoder, I believe we have succeeded in both areas.

To test, I took 48 minutes of archived Apple Ads and compressed them on a Quad G5 machine. I used the Movie for Podcast preset, which I believe is the best choice for Macintosh users who plan to play movies on both their computer and their iPod.

The result: 48 minutes of QuickTime source footage (64 files) compressed to iPod-ready video in an amazing 4 minutes! That is approximately 10x real-time.

As it stands, I consider Apple's MPEG-4 AAC (audio) encoder to produce a better audio quality than the tools based on the open source solutions. So if the open source tools have an edge in picture quality, Apple's audio encoder has the edge in sound quality. So if we are to believe George Lucas "Sound is half the motion picture experience", then there is good reason to choose MoviesForMyPod over ffmpegX or iSquint.

Labels: fastest ipod converter, mac