Troubles with iMac

[TheBlackHalbardier]

I'm having problems finding a good way to compress a DVD into something readable that looks even halfway decent on my iMac G4.

I had been following Kirin's Making AMV's with iMovie guide fairly closely, but when I got to using DivA to compress VOB's into Apple Pixlet video encoding, the VOB compresses to about the quarter of its original size, and the quality ends up extremely bad - I mean 'you can't even read the opening credits' bad. The images are pixellated and blurry, and have this odd flickering effect. However, to import DV encoding into iMovie it appears that I need QuickTime Pro.

So I'd like to know what options I have for encoding my videos into something that iMovie can use but that also doesn't look like it came off YouTube. My setup is thus: I have an HP Pavilion dv4000 series with an 80 GB hard-drive (60 GB Windows partition with 7 GB free; 20 GB Linux with 14 GB free, I think; 1 GB RAM) and an older iMac G4 (also 80 GB hard drive but with 46 GB free, with 1 GB RAM). I have the AMVApp on my laptop, and OSEx, DivA, Clip Creator and D-Volution on my iMac. (My iMac, however, has no internet access.)

I had been wondering if I might not get better results ripping and decoding the DVD on my PC and transferring the AVI files over to my iMac with a memory stick. Or I could use Windows Movie Maker. Again, I just want to know what options I might have. Thanks![/url]

[BasharOfTheAges]

I had been wondering if I might not get better results ripping and decoding the DVD on my PC and transferring the AVI files over to my iMac with a memory stick.

Or network them and transfer files... but yea, from all i've heard about MAC editing that's one of the easiest things to do.

[Shazzy]

Don't use DiVA. Use MPEG Streamclip and encode to DV.

I have a guide on it here. Let me know if you have further questions.

[kmv]

I had been wondering if I might not get better results ripping and decoding the DVD on my PC and transferring the AVI files over to my iMac with a memory stick.

Or network them and transfer files... but yea, from all i've heard about MAC editing that's one of the easiest things to do.

There are loads of options, but if it has no network access (for some reason) then you are left with two:

1. Use a removeable media (USB key, CD/DVD, external HDD)
2. Turn the mac into a firewire disk (hold down 'T' on boot)

Note: if you use an external HDD, Mac OSX can't write to NTFS volumes (it can read from them however) - unless you are using MacFUSE. I don't know why it's not fully supported out of the box (there is a ton of speculation on the net), but my money is on joint licensing issues between NTFS and HFS+.

[TheBlackHalbardier]

Thanks Bashar, Shazzy, kmv!

I've actually fixed the decoding problem using Shazzy's suggestion (much higher quality using DV), though now the problem is more lack of hard drive space, which should be easy enough to fix with an external hard drive.