I've used Compressor2 for a while now and am just not thrilled with it. Does anyone have experience with another Mac based encoder and have strong feelings about which will give the best quality and/or the best encoding speed?

BitVice:
http://www.innobits.se/

Digigami MegaPEG HDTV:
http://www.digigami.com/megapeg/index.php

CompressionMaster:
http://www.popwire.com/product_info.php?cPath=1&products_id=2

MainConcept:
http://www.mainconcept.com/site/index.php?id=757

I did a bunch of tests with BitVice and MainConcept a while ago because, like you, I wasn't thrilled with Compressor. A ton of people on this and other forums swear by the quality from BitVice, but it's painfully slow. My test encodes took four or five times as long with BitVice as they did on Compressor (both running on the same PowerMac). If time isn't a factor for you then it's a good option, but if you don't have all day and night to wait around all the time, I would avoid it.

MainConcept had fine speed, but I couldn't see a meaningful difference in the encode quality. I did see a meaningful difference in the levels, but I didn't spend the additional time to work out settings to correct that.

To be fair I must mention that all the DVDs I make come from DV source footage. I have no clue how these encoders compare if you're working from high quality sources.

When I first started looking at encoders, I found this article helpful: http://digitalcontentproducer.com/mag/video_mpeg_encoder_shootout/index.html. It's partially outdated now, but there's still some good information.

I hope you'll post your final choice. I'd be interested to hear about Digigami and the Popwire product.

Are you running compressor 2 or 2.1? 2.1 Has had a lot of work done to improve it in speed and quality.

I hope you'll post your final choice. I'd be interested to hear about Digigami and the Popwire product.
I'd be interested too. I need to compress for an MPEG2 version of our video in about three weeks and I want to know what the best program to use is. I have Compressor on the way to me in the mail (not sure which version -- it's part of the FCP Studio Crossgrade). However, I'm looking to be charged about 1k to have it compressed professionally and would just assume do it myself if I can get close to their quality.

Any update? I'd like to know which program gets the thumbs up. The place I'm going to for my DLT doesn't even want to deal with my project if it was encoded with Compressor...apparently they've had too many problems. But they are about $1800 to encode MPEG2/Dolby (105 min. project). I'd just assume do it myself if I can near their quality.

I have tried Procoder and Mainconcept and they are neck and neck. My editor comes with a Mainconcept encoder so I end up using that.

Apple's codecs / encoders in general are a total joke, except maybe their AAC codec :)

Nothing beats CCE (Cinema Craft) for progressive encoding, but that's sadly Windows only.

I would say give libavcodec's implimentation a go. It's platform independant, and can be accessed on the mac through ffmpegX, which is a GUI for mencoder. It's tremendously fast, though I haven't done any extensive quality comparisons.

-Derek Prestegard