Yes, it is *very* slow! And if you don't have a lot of ram (and the LC certainly does not), then you've got to use VM, which just makes the suffering that much more intense. But the wondrous thing is that the LC can do this at all.

And I'm sure that I'm not getting the best out of Cinepak that it has to offer -- I'm a definite neophyte wrt Cinepak. I have the quality slider in the middle, for example. I also noticed that the target bitrate has only the loosest correlation with the actual bitrate achieved in the final result, so I'm sure I could do better. Thanks very much for letting me know about the temporal slider. I'll try activating it and playing around some later.

Just fyi, the source file is an excerpt of an XVCD version of Galaxy Quest. Plenty of CGI, fast motion, explosions, zooming and all that, so perhaps it's not surprising that MJPEG does well. I am encouraged to hear that Cinepak can do better than I've been able to get from it, so any additional tips you can offer on how to squeeze the most out of it would be welcome. Its light decode requirements are very attractive to us low-enders!