Hardware Encoder, any suggestions ?

[kyonn]

Does anyone know of a cheap (sub $200) MPEG2 hardware encoder board. I don't need any sort of capturing ability, just something that can convert video files (i.e. avi, mov, wmv) that are already on my hard drive to SVCD MPEG2. Basically I'm looking for something that does what tmpgenc does but faster. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[snowmoon]

It's called a CPU. 8)

Unfortunatly I don't believe their are any consumer level cards that allow you to do offline mpeg-2 encoding.

[bani]

no hardware encoder under $200 will do an acceptable job. this is from direct experience.

stick with software encoding, unless you have a couple thousand dollars to burn.

[SatStorm]

Unfortunatelly, there are no good and cheap hardware mpeg 2 encoders. The best "cheap" solution, are some hauppauge's products. The problem is that you can't get good quality @ CVD/SVCD bitrates, so a re-encoding is neccessary....

Software solutions are for now much better and with a combination of 2 CPUs, which is not impossible today even for AMD based PCs, faster than realtime is more than possible, even with slower encoders like TMPGenc.

I suggest to go and buy an asus or msi dual motherboard with 2 Athlon XPs @ 2100 or higher. It gonna cost you 500 Euros but you gonna have speed you never imagine. Wait a couple of months and after x-mass, this combo gonna cost 350 Euros. I wait.....

[bani]

you are going to have to filter and edit the video anyway, so the speed of dual cpu will help you with that too.

really, it's not so bad to leave an mpeg encode go overnight when you're sleeping anyway. you won't miss a hardware encoder. don't worry about it.