January 10th, 2000

[6:00 AM] M.Pack encodes MPEG's at G4 Speeds by Staff ASTARTE GmbH announced that version 3.5.1 of their MPEG encoding software, M.Pack, now has support for the Velocity Engine in PowerMac G4's. According to ASTARTE: Specially optimized for the new Velocity Engine in the Macintosh G4, M.Pack 3.5.1 offers encoding speeds over twice as fast as the prior version. In addition, M.Pack now supports the creation of files larger than 2 GB under OS9, and will accept source movies larger than 2 GB. With its dramatically increased performance and low price , M.Pack is the most affordable way to get high quality MPEG encoding on the Macintosh. It accepts any QuickTime movie as its source, and converts it to industry standard MPEG format. It can also be used in conjunction with Adaptec Toast to create Video-CDs. M.Pack offers convenient batch processing, and the ability to save your preferred settings as a unit which can be easily applied to any source movie. The program encodes in MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 formats, and even offers variable bit rate encoding for MPEG-2. M.Pack is available for US$399. ASTARTE GmbH - MACWORLD Expo SF Special Report