I’m yet to find a decent free “DVD Shrink for Mac”. I’ve used ffmpegX to compress DVDs down to single layer size, but it can really only compress a whole disc and lacks the “reauthor” feature of DVD Shrink. But then I thought, why not run DVD Shrink through Wine? So I installed Darwine on my MBP, which is a great little package and worked straight out of the box. My first impressions were that it was bloody fast. So I thought I’d encode a whole DVD as an impromptu benchmark against my PC. This isn’t meant to be some “Wine on a Mac is better than a real Windows” spiel. That would just be silly. It’s more a comparison for interest’s sake so I can prove it to myself, and add another one to the growing list of contributors to my PCs obsolescence.

The original DVD was 6.93 GB and pre-ripped to a 5400rpm USB 2.0 drive. The same drive was used on both Windows & Mac. The encoded DVD was saved to the local hard drive, and not back to the USB hard drive. DVD Shrink version 3.2.0.15 was used.

MBP Specs: Core 2 Duo 2.2 Ghz, 2 GB DDR2, 5400 rpm.
Time to encode on MPB (Wine): 24m 56s

PC Specs: Dual Core P4 3.4 GHz, 2 GB DDR2, 7200 rpm.
Time to encode on PC (WinXP): 34m 38s

Wine is still a bit glitchy pretty usable, once you get past the annoying xterm and log windows it insists on spawning. It maps the Desktop and filesystem root in My Computer for easy access; you just have to remember to do the “Explorery” stuff like creating folders in Finder, as Explorer functionality is limited in some areas.

Next I’m gonna leave uTorrent running for a couple of days and see how stable it is.

UPDATE: To stop xterm launching when X11 is started, run this command in terminal: defaults write org.x.X11 app_to_run /usr/bin/true which updates your ~/Library/Preferences/org.x.X11.plist file.