Needing some software to convert video from avi/divx format to something more Mac friendly as i have some videos that won't work on the mac for when i am on the ship. Something windows based is okay

preferabley cheap got to keep the scottish thing up

There are players available that support most DivX formats on the Mac. If it's an AVI with some less common codec, then you're probably out of luck though.

Have you tried the following?

DivX QT plugin
http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/

VLC
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

mPlayer
http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/

convertToQT
http://homepage.mac.com/cgodefroy/macosxdev/index.html

Windows Media Player
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/software/Macintosh/osx/default.aspx

The DivX plugin for QT works great these days. WMP for Mac plays nothing but WMA and WMV files, IIRC.

VLC
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

I just want to chime in here and praise VLC for freeing me from Codec Hell. Codecs as far as I'm concered are evil because WMP rarely tells you what codec it needs, and frequently plays just the audio or garbled video.

With VLC, it just works. It's not too pretty, but I havn't run accross a video file that it won't play yet.

Matthew

I second a vote for mplayer, the program which released me from codec hell. Right out of the box, mplayer played almost anything I threw at it. The things it didn't play worked fine after I downloaded a few files and threw them in the program's codec directory. It works flawlessly, and that's on Windows!

Given the amount of time that it takes to convert video (it took me weeks to convert all the video I wanted to take with me to Europe to MPEG4), I'd definitely suggest trying a program that can play the files you want to before converting them to a format that works with the programs you have.

Sorry to hijack the thread (though the subject is the same), but I assumed the issue was resolved.

Can someone suggest a very fast program for converting video files to mpeg2 for DVD video creation? TMPGEnc isn't cutting it for me as it is taking nearly 10 hours per 45 minute video I feed it. This just isn't acceptable, especially when it's not getting the audio correctly, and then I have to create the DVD with my authoring program. I don't mind that step, as it takes an acceptable amount of time (15 minutes at most for two hours of video). It's the 10 other hours I need to cut down.

I understand this is an arduous process for computers, and my machine is getting just a tad old for this type of application (Athlon 2100), but I'm sure it should be faster than this. I just think an alternative program might be out there that can do it faster.

For example, when I was converting videos for my Archos, I was using a program that took about 2 hours to convert a 45 min. video to MPEG4. I now use another program I tried which only takes about 20 minutes.

Any suggestions?

You could try the bbmpeg, but I doubt it's much faster. MPEG-2 encoding is a very slow process- especially if you want DVD quality. That's why professional movie studios spend thousands on realtime MPEG-2 compression PCI cards.