Very Unstable/Slow OS X

[drisley]

I've been using Avidemux on my old Windows machine (6 years old Windows 7) for years to edit files and it worked amazing (especially the older 2.5.4 builds), fast and 100% stable.

On a new loaded up iMac now and it's a very different beast. You have to Mount it first to open it, then open the program which seems weird. Most files don't work or crash the program (2.6.6).
I have some MKV files that use vorbis as an example. On the Windows version I could just re-output as Copy but use the audio mode to aac, and all was fine. But this of course crashes Avidemux on Mac.

But most of the avi's, mp4's, mkv's have issues with even just trying to cut out frames. I converted one avi file to a mp4, and it took longer on this i7 computer with 16GB memory than with the old Avidemux on my ancient athlon dual core with 2gb memory.

Any ideas? They alway say Apples are the best machines for multimedia, but I'm finding the exact opposite. No thumbs for previews for anything other than a mac file (mov, qt, mp4) and editing (without reencoding) is almost impossible.

Is this just the nature of the Mac beast? I either might have to run parallels, or send this iMac back and build a new PC (if I can). Just frustrated that a program I loved so long behaves so poorly on a different OS.

Thanks!

27" iMac i7
16GB
780M 4GB Video
3TB Fusion Drive
Mavericks

[styrol]

You have to Mount it first to open it, then open the program which seems weird.

Yes, and on the PC, you may have to run an installer. So mount the disk image once and copy the application to the application folder. It's your decision, you can learn to get along with a new system or you can send your iMac back based on your experience that Avidemux performs very poorly on the Mac platform.

They alway say Apples are the best machines for multimedia, but I'm finding the exact opposite.
[..]
Is this just the nature of the Mac beast?

Is there any relation from Apple to Avidemux? No, of course not.

[drisley]

Is there anything on the Mac side like Avidemux that runs as fast and stable as Avidemux on the Windows side?
Weird place to ask, but just asking because it's frustrating (might have to use parallels or bootcamp).

[fkuebler]

I believe to have some understanding of your frustration. Probably 2 effects are coming together: first the generally changed operating environment on OSX compared to Windows ('New is not necessarily better or worse, but always different, and this often feels initially worse!"), and second the differing set of flaws and benefits an the OSX version of Avidemux.

While I have found things not to work flawless in Avidemux (you might look at my posts here), I'm using it much to my benefit, and it is my second-most used program in dealing with my videothek (1. Handbrake, 2. Avidemux, 3. MKVToolnix, 4. Subler, 5. remux). I'm using only the nightly builds, both with Handbrake and Avidemux, and I think this is essential.

Whether the Mac is a better experience than a Windows computer, this is a matter of personal taste. I switched in 2006 from Windows and at that time, I felt intrigued and relieved, but I'm far from idealizing OSX or the Mac in general. But I'm still using Windows 8.1 on Parallels for some rare special programs, and I don't feel lured to think about switching back anytime soon. No idea though, how this feels in 5 or 10 years...

[casa]

I've been wondering about this myself.

I have a MacBook Pro 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7. Avidemux 2.6.7.

I'm trying to re-encode a 40-minute show OTA that's 1080i, mpeg2 video, and at some arbitrary bitrate that the TV station is using (4.5GB file) to a nicely deinterlaced 720p mp4.

I'm getting 5 fps with an estimated completion time of 3 hours, natively in OS X.

When I run Avidemux 2.6.7 in VMware Fusion on Windows, the same file finishes encoding in an hour. This is with the VM getting just 1 core of the i7. It should be running slower with a quarter brain and less memory. This is just crazy.

Although, there is one thing new today. I decided to put the video files on an exFAT partition on an external USB 3.0 drive. I don't know if OS X is slow with exFAT, which would explain things. Otherwise, I'd have to shrug it off as a bad port to OS X.

[mean]

By default macport disables sse/mmx/...
Trying to force it to see if it works

[mean]

Is it better with that :
http://avidemux.org/nightly/osx/Avidemux2.6_r8988.dmg

[casa]

HandBrake (OS X) did the same 1080i->720p mpeg2->h.264 in 30 minutes.

I can just use Avidemux to edit out the commercials and then use HandBrake for the encoding. Besides, HandBrake has a very easy GUI for batch encoding. Maybe this is SOP for everyone else, and I shouldn't have tried to do everything with Avidemux.

[mean]

ok, but does the above version fix the issue ?

[kenshin3it]

ok, but does the above version fix the issue ?

much better...nearly 3 times faster than before