I'm having problems finding a good way to compress a DVD into something readable that looks even halfway decent on my iMac G4.
I had been following Kirin's Making AMV's with iMovie guide fairly closely, but when I got to using DivA to compress VOB's into Apple Pixlet video encoding, the VOB compresses to about the quarter of its original size, and the quality ends up extremely bad - I mean 'you can't even read the opening credits' bad. The images are pixellated and blurry, and have this odd flickering effect. However, to import DV encoding into iMovie it appears that I need QuickTime Pro.
So I'd like to know what options I have for encoding my videos into something that iMovie can use but that also doesn't look like it came off YouTube. My setup is thus: I have an HP Pavilion dv4000 series with an 80 GB hard-drive (60 GB Windows partition with 7 GB free; 20 GB Linux with 14 GB free, I think; 1 GB RAM) and an older iMac G4 (also 80 GB hard drive but with 46 GB free, with 1 GB RAM). I have the AMVApp on my laptop, and OSEx, DivA, Clip Creator and D-Volution on my iMac. (My iMac, however, has no internet access.)
I had been wondering if I might not get better results ripping and decoding the DVD on my PC and transferring the AVI files over to my iMac with a memory stick. Or I could use Windows Movie Maker. Again, I just want to know what options I might have. Thanks![/url]

