hardware MPEG2 encoding, not grabbbing :?

[tandr]

Hi folks,

After some halfeveing search of the web and these forums, I still cannot get an answer.

Suppose I have Motherboard with Firewire (or separate card). So I capture some video from camcorder to the disk, edit it, add some stupid effectcs. Now I need to encode it for dvd (or svcd). My dual celeron dying on this task. Well... even dual athlon super-puper does it slowly. So, question is... Is there PCI card and software that I can send my DV AVI file though it, and get MPEG2 file as an output FAST? I know that hardware encoding is not perfect and u cannot play with lotsa settings, but... If these grabber cards can grab and encode RT, I am sure some of them can just encode faster then RT, or just a bit slower(and better?) -- I dont care 20% speed drop. Unfortuanlly, I just cannot find any reference or looking for the wrong thing.

Thank you in advance,
t.

[davideck]

I am sure that many people will disagree with me, but I have found that capturing my DV Camcorder ANALOG Ouput with a Hauppauge PVR-250 yields high quality results. The 250 has a built in real time hardware encoder with video proc and bitrate adjustments. I have also tried capturing through firewire and software encoding. I think the Analog result looks better. On a technical level, the inherent lowpass filtering that results from the Analog path actually eliminates some amount of high frequency noise (and content) that would otherwise eat up bitrate resources. A bit of filtering is good. I have noticed that the mpeg artifacts are more noticeable using the firewire approach for a given bitrate. I have only used the Ulead and Adaptec software encoders, however. OK all you TMPGEnc users, have at me!

[fingernailX]

Targa 3000 with Mpegworks

http://www.pinnaclesys.com/ProductPage.asp?Product_ID=91&Langue_ID=7#3

Have one at work but ain't cheap

[ktnwin]

If you don't mind to spend 50$ for neoDVD Plus software, this damn thing converts AVI to DVD superfast (1X on my Atlhon 1.2GHz).
I knew how slow DVD software encoding took. I made only about 4 DVD discs with PS8 and now 100+ DVDs with neoDVD Plus (did not count but I used by my bulk 100 DVD disc, just bought another 30 mores.
It's not the best, but it's good and FAST.
I was looking for a PCI encoder card too, you feed AVI data to it and it should give you MPEG-2 but this thing does not exists to my knowledge.

[SLK001]

I have a Sigma Designs RealMagic DVR card that converts either S-Video or Composite video to MPEG-2 files in real time. Excellent quality, too. Just don't use it in a VIA chipset computer.

[SaSi]

Dejavue...

I've made myself the same question, did the same search on the net, did the same posting in the forum, got the same answers...

Since I am a couple of months ahead of you on that, let me offer some future reference.

While I was watching Tmpgenc crawl along at 9 hours per movie, I made the thought: Why not put one of those real time encoders to the job? Would be 10~15 times faster. Should be feasible. Take an MPEG encoder chip, put it on a PCI board, feed it with frames (same way the capture circuit does on the capture cards), make it return the encoded bitstream and store it on disk. Piece of cake.

Haven't found any descent solution.

And, the funny thing is it's not needed.

Capture cards with encoders do brute force encoding. They are forced to encode in real time (or suffer lost frames). They are short in resources (to do proper motion estimation and scene change detection you need quite a few frames in store which translates to quite a few MB of RAM and a descent CPU to address that fast; MPEG encoders aren't designed for that).

Software encoders have the ability to scan and rescan the video stream and make intelligent decisions. That translates to better quality for a given bitrate. And bitrate is a scarse resource.

On the speed issue, a descent PC with a descent encoder should encode well faster than real-time. Mainconcept gives me quite good encoded streams at 1.6x realtime with VBR and low average bitrates in a single pass. CCE also does the same at approximatelly the same speed.

Next year, CPU speeds will double and all the figures above will double as well.

At the same time, mathematicians and software engineers are working on developing encoding and prediction algorithms that will bring the current state of encoders to a better position.

I would argue that current encoding s/w is rather primitive. Next year it will be better and after that much better. Algorithms will become much more complex and efficient and will utilize the enormous memory capacity of PCs.

Doing the same in silicon (hardware encoding) is much more difficult and a dead end. This is my explanation for the lack of superfast MPEG encoding hardware for PCs (like the old-style add-in math coprocessor in the 8088 and 80286 days).

In any case, even if such an "accelerator" board exists, it is going to be damned expensive. Much more expensive than getting yourself a dual P4/3GHz motherboard with CPUs.

[tandr]

Thanks fingernailX and SaSi.

fingernailX -- yeah, this targa does not look cheap at all. besides that it will be clear overkill in my simple home-use case.

SaSi -- I think you are right, but only partialy. Problem with PC (or whatever is sitting on your desk) that it become faster exactly with the same speed as other hardware solutions. I mean, in year your PC will be 1.5 times faster, but these possible solutions for MPEG2 in hardware could be 3 times faster as well. To put some 32 meg of memory on board is not big deal nowadays -- take a look on some latest vid cards that have more memory than average PC 2 years ago. Actually, I think these grabber cards could do perfectly off-line whatever they do RT. The reason why we cannot use it this way is only lazy programmers (marketing departments?) that dont want to write some additional code to the drivers to push DV frames back to card.

Oh well... this means that I basicaly need to wait till... shit I dunno, till my wife will permit to get a new comp (read -- not anytime soon )

thanks,
t

PS. SaSi, do u mind to find your post from while back, so I can look on it (and answers a la "get this super fast Software" ) by myself?

PPS. hmm... if this market niche is so open, may be we need to create one card like these...

[darkstar127]

Cheapest DV to MPEG-2 encoder is listed here

http://www.esbuy.com/snaziiigoled.html

At $299 it looks like a great deal. I haven't had a chance to actually try it. If it works as advertised, it would be great for those of us doing VHS to DVD transfers in a business production environment.

There are other encoder cards listed at Canopus and other places that are in the $1,000 range.