Hardware Encoding

[jeby1980]

My Avermedia HC80 ExpressCard Analog/Digital TV tuner has the capability of encoding to MPEG-2 format. The literature says its built into the tuner's hardware. Does anyone know if this is typical, and if all softwares would take advantage of this?

Aka, is using Vista Media Center going to ignore the fact that the tuner has a built in encoder and beat on my CPU to encode?

[SHS]

The softwares it come with and MCE should take advantage of that just that other 3rdparty will not unless it build to make use of that Hardware Encoder.

[edDV]

My Avermedia HC80 ExpressCard Analog/Digital TV tuner has the capability of encoding to MPEG-2 format. The literature says its built into the tuner's hardware. Does anyone know if this is typical, and if all softwares would take advantage of this?

Aka, is using Vista Media Center going to ignore the fact that the tuner has a built in encoder and beat on my CPU to encode?

MCE and other similar PVR software almost require hardware encoding to take the load off the CPU and disc system