Comparison of Real Time MPEG Encoders

[Bstansbury]

I've looked through the help guides and found lots of comparisons on the 4 best software encoders, i.e., Main Concept, CCE, TMPGen, (____), you can fill in the blank.

I've also searched through most of the forums looking for post on comparisons, and found some that were great. However, I've not seen any comparisons that include the real time encoders that come on some of the Capture cards. This could be because they must not really be good enough to compare. For example, I have an ATI all in wonder Radeon card that can capture to my system in MPEG format, SVCD 480x480, I frame only at 8 Mbs with virtually no dropped frames, and do this in real time,... i.e. directly off a VHS tape. The resulting video is not all that bad but I'm sure it's not close to the top 4 above. But this is because those are encoding at about 5-9 fps rate, and the ATI card is doing 2 fields at 30 fps which is 60 fields per second.

My question is,.... Is there nothing in between these two extremes?

When I capture basic VHS tapes, it's too simple for me to just capture them directly to MPG SVCD format,.. edit them, and then just burn them.

However, when I get a high quality video, like Composite off of a DirectTV
program, or DV from a Sony Handycam, I can't do it in real time so I have to capture in AVI, edit, frameserve, encode, burn,.. which is not a short process.

I would really appreciate any suggestions or comments on this subject.

[q1aqza]

I get excellant results from my Hauppauge PVR 250. Like many people I had a few teething problems getting this card to work but once I did I have been very pleased with it's hardware real-time encoding quality. It saves me huge amounts of time compared to the AVI / encode capture route. I have converted lots of my VHS tapes to DVD.

I capture at DVD quality and the results are excellant, although I have also done test captures at SVCD & CVD specs and the results are very good.