Can you route avi throught hardware encoder?

[friesr]

I have a wintv-pvr250 with an onborad hardware mpge2 encoder. Is it possible to route an avi file i have on my hdd throuth the encoder to produce the mpeg2 file? If so, how?

Thx,
Rod

[andkiich]

You could copy the AVI file to a DV camera, then feed that back through the card capturing in MPEG2.

Otherwise, all the encoders that I know of are software MPEG2 encoders and do not use the hardware MPEG2 chipsets in any way.

[thayne]

No you can't. Even friesr's methode is not really a good way to do it. The PVR-250 has only analog inputs, so you would be going digital to analog and back to digital. You'd be way better off using a software encoder....

[friesr]

Good point... I had not thought of that!

Then my question is what type of time frame should i be able to conver a 1hr video? I have an xp2000 with 512 and it seems to take 4hr per hour of video to encode it. Is there a faster way? Something that is 1:1 or better?

[thayne]

Woops I meant andkiich's methode.

4 hours isn't bad. From what I have found faster encoders = worse quality

I use TMPGEnc with 2-pass vbr encoding and it takes about 3-4 hours for an hour of video on my 2.0GHz P4

You can use CBR and cut the time in half, but you have to encode at a higher bitrate to get the same quality and your final file size will be bigger.

I have another encoder that came with my DVD burner that can do it in real time, but the output quality is junk.