Hardware MPEG encoding

[pb]

Has anyone used the FusionMPEG (Dvico) or Dazzle DVC2 hardware encoders?? What is the quality like compared to CCE or TMPGEnc?? Especially for DV camera material, which is all I do. DV seems to be harder to encode to VCD/SVCD with good quality.

[igornt]

Guys, please also pass your opinion about Matrox RT2500 (MPEG2) vs CCE for DV. Thanks!

[TheInformer]

First of all let me say, IMHO, that software encoding will look better than hardware encoding, unless you spend $$$ for a ninja hardware board.

That being said, the DVC II's MPEG-2 captures at higher bitrates are really good. The MPEG-1 captures at lower (VCD) bitrates, well, are average at best....nothing to write home about.

[fakesky]

I have a wintv PVR, and just as the guy before said,
if you capture directly to vcd it´ll work fine if you play it on your dvdplayer
or whatever, but the quality will be decent at best.
Software encoding is obviously better, since the encoding process dosnt have to be "rushed" in order to keep up with the video.
The hardware mpeg2/1 cards at resonable prices just cant make a vcd look better than decent.

However, the way I do, is capping at 8mbit/s with full resolution
and then it turns out exellent captures.
The capture ofcourse is way to big, but I just pass the encoded
file on to tmpegenc or CCE and let it convert the video to svcd or vcd,
and the results are as good as avi->vcd.
And because of the HW encoding I dont have to worry about dropped
frames, waaaay to big files or any of that other junk that avi capping involves.

But again if you are doing it for the speed only the quality wont be too good unless you make svcds or higher bitrate.

[Nelson37]

One point - a hardware-only device will never get any better.

I have upgraded thru 800 - 1000 - 1400 - 1700Mhz over two years, with a corresponding increase in real-time capture quality with my under $100 ATI card. While I still capture hi-bitrate and re-encode for BEST quality, real-time capture is now good enough for casual use. Plus everything else I use is faster as well.

The newer ATI cards, and the Nvidia, so I hear, are also good gaming cards. Both are heavily processor-dependent, meaning they get better as you go faster. The ATI does some minor things in hardware to boost performance, but only with their codec.

I read a lot of the real-time capture posts, and it seems that even with hardware-encoding, except for $1000 boards, they all cap at higher bitrates and re-encode for really good video. Except maybe the pv-231 for VCD only.

So get a cheap capture card and spend the extra money you save on a faster mobo, chip and ram. In fact, if you watch the price curves and find some folks who want some upgrading, about every six months you can make someone a deal on your slightly used components, charge a few bucks for putting them in and upgrade for free, if you buy at internet prices.

[spiderman09]

I just recently purchased a WinTV PVR 250. It actually encodes fairly well from TV in my limited experience. My question is this....

I would like to take advantage of the hardware mpeg 2 encoding to convert other avi,mpeg etc files to MPEG 2......is there a way to do this? can any of the commercial programs support using the encoder for conversion? SO far I am limited to using the encoder to record TV or video....

Please help!

Jason