iDVD and making a custom DVD

so... I have 4 AVI's all sized ~350MB and ~43 minutes in length. I chose a menu I really like and put together a DVD. It was ~6GB large and to make it fit I used dvd2one one it.

The encoding process took me 3:40 hours and the resizing another 20 mins, so basically 4 hours for a 240 min DVD. Is that slow? I use a 2.16GHz macbook with 1GB RAM and a 5400RPM HDD. Would adding more RAM or buying a 7200RPM HDD improve things and by how much?

Activity Monitor can allow you to see how much memory you are using while running those processes. If you are near your 1GB then more memory could help.

Faster drives can help but again you need to figure out if the drive is a bottle neck. For that you need to know the expected throughput of the drive and look at the Disk Activity tab.

The question is how big of an improvement you will see.

I'll check teh activity monitor, but can you (or someone else) tell me would it be more beneficial to do the encoding on a 4 or 8 core machine rather than on a 2 core one? Does the fact that I have integrated graphics make a difference?

Bilobrkster said:

I'll check teh activity monitor, but can you (or someone else) tell me would it be more beneficial to do the encoding on a 4 or 8 core machine rather than on a 2 core one? Does the fact that I have integrated graphics make a difference?

Click to expand...

Video conversion is primarily down to number crunching. RAM, HDD speed both have a part to play but the biggest influence is the processor(s).
Simply:- The greater the grunt, the faster the conversion.

so all things being equal, a faster processor would encode faster. BUT, would a processor with more cores also do it faster? what I'm basically asking is iDVD optimized for single core processors or 2 or 4 or 8 cores?

iDVD's workload is split over multiple threads so yes.... it will benefit from multiple cores.

How much is subjective and related to your source materials original format/encoding.

A bit of Googling might find you some benchmarks.

In Activity Monitor, look under CPU %. If your process is taking more than 100%, then it must be using more than one processor.

Just because an application is using more than 100% CPU doesn't garrantee the process will use more than 2 cores, as it could have been written to a limit of 2. Today though, most code designers that are trying to get the maximum bang out of the multi processor machines will not place this kind of hard limit in their application.

Has anyone seen iDVD or iMovie use more than 200% CPU resources? I'm under the impression that they will use what is available, but I haven't seen it because I only have dual processor machines.