ok, you guys are right, i made a HUGE mistake. I am using flip4mac (a plugin for quicktime) which allows me to encode to wmv. I only had the trial version, wich will only encode the first 30 seconds of a video. Last night i realized this and bought the full version. And encoding to wmv takes a very long time. I'll be completely honest. I'm kinda mad it takes so long. I started a movie last night at about 11 p.m. it it now 7 a.m., and its not done yet. It is at 74 percent.
BUT, i am using very high quality settings,plus i am changing the resolution to make it bigger. So once this one gets done, i will try to do a movie with just average setting. then i will give my time on that.
What are your times, how long does a 2 hour movie take, and what kind of settings are you using. Are you doing a two pass encode, or one pass. are you keeping the resolution the same. Mose downloaded videos if widescreen are around 596X246. Are you keeping this, or are you making it bigger.
All these things make a HUGE differnce. So give some more info. Because to tell you the truth, i just got this mac pro about 1 month ago. And i need to know how fast it is compared to a pc.
There is also one other problem i can think off. I am encoding in a windows codec (wmv) on a mac. So i am kinda thinking it is not gonna be that fast. Just like if you on your pc, tried to encode to a quicktime movie format. It would probably take longer for you. I can encode to h.264, which is apples quicktime codec (the best one) very fast, much faster than wmv. Of course if xbox 360 would read more video formats, i wouldn't have to be going through all this trouble. let me know if you can. thanks.