I was thinking of getting a mac-mini because i cannot afford a G5.
PPC has a good FPU but it's true power lies inside Altivec.

Has anyone done any DVD-rips (encode NOT shrinking etc..) with a G5/G4 and optimized software for these CPU ???

It will be good to post your times for the process and the quolity.
Maybe we can do a comparison with the SSE/2/3 that x86(_64) use.

Most of my interest relies on running Yelloow dog linux or Gentoo or Debian on a PPC.

If you run OSX and you have done an encode please be free to post more information regarding: time for the encode etc..

I have done a DVDrip &encode on a mac mini with handbrake in OSX
times for a 90 min movie to be encoded in the omg format are about 4 hours

nels

Mencoder is fully AltiVec-optimized so it should perform very well on a G4 system. I haven't tried ripping DVDs myself so I couldn't give you any stats, as for quality it should be top notch considering MPlayer is one of the best movie players around.

If you are going to run Linux I would highly recommend that you look into buying a Pegasos instead. It has a replaceable CPU-card so you can upgrade to a faster processor as they are made available. An AGP-port so that you can upgrade the graphics card (in the Mini you are stuck with a Radeon 9200 forever) and there are three PCI-slots for adding whatever functionality you want.

You can even sponsor the Gentoo Foundation by buying an ODW from http://vendors.gentoo.org/index.cgi?page=1&comGroup=1.
If you buy from Apple you'll only sponsor their move to x86 and get a piece of hardware which will not be supported by Apple for much longer.

i personally haven't done any encoding because i have an old cpu.
But isn't 4 hours kinda a lot ?? i've read that users with P4 make it to 3hours or even less.
But i have to admint here that Mac-mini come with a slow HDD only 166Mhz FSB and not a lot of memory.Especially the lack of memory and the 166Mhz FSB don't let the Altivec to achieve it's best performance IMHO.

Maybe G5 would make it better since it's fully 64bit in OSX has 600+ FSB and of couse you can add more memory like you can do with the mac-mini.

no-one here with a G5 that has tried an encode ?

Sorry, I have no test on G5 either, but G4-1GHz with
mencoder performs quite nicely.

This might also be of interest, if you have more than
one host available: a cluster-capable dvd-rip GUI:

http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/index.cipp

Regards,
Peter