macs better at media encoding?

I am not sure it might have something to do with quicktime being the main mac media content. Quicktime has much better compression then avi or wmv therefore less space on your hard drive is taken up and if you manage a lot of video that can be a very useful thing.

hmmm...

Any other reasons anybody?

do macs have a common processor use (ie they mainly use intel ect...) as some processors blast through encoding (p4e/4f esp due to long pipelines).

The architecture of the mac processor is simply better at handling photo and video files than Intel or AMD processors. It can "number crunch" them faster, so to speak.

nice! they use their own? i shoulda known! we had macs at school in the music dept. very fast at signal processing i tell thee.