On and off over the past few months I've been researching ways to transcode (convert) my DV tapes to DVD format (DV stream to MPEG-2 format) to better preserve our videos of Justin. I was hoping to find an external box that had some sort of hardware acceleration to do near-real time DV stream-to-MPEG-2 transcoding, had FireWire ports for connection to DV camera (input) and computer (output), and ideally, included software for both Macs and PCs. Guess what? I didn't find anything like that. I heard that I could buy a new Mac and do the transcoding of a 60-minute tape using iDVD in about 2-3 hours. An advantage of using a Mac would be the excellent software — iMovie and iDVD — for editing the video and then organizing and laying out the DVD with backgrounds, buttons, and menus. My colleague, Eric Lin in Taiwan, recommended CyberLink's PowerDirector Pro for doing the transcoding on the PC although he said it took about 5-6 hours on a 2GHz Pentium 4 box with 1GB SDRAM — slower than on the Mac. At present, I'm not prepared to buy a new Mac for this "project". My feeling is that right now, Apple's existing Power Mac line-up is over-priced and under-powered. I think they need to start using faster processors. I'm waiting for Macs to use the successor of the PowerPC G4 processor with speeds close to 2GHz. So thus far, I haven't transcoded any of my DV tapes!

I did find an article, Video Editing: PC or Mac?, that was quite interesting and insightful. It makes a strong case for going with a PC for video editing and also introduced some cool applications such as the Windows-only DVD X Copy. With DVD X Copy (and DVD X Copy Xpress) you can make perfect backups of your DVDs and I think it's the only product out in the market that does it.