A little help needed

[shaady]

I've done some research, looked through the forums, and the capture card section. I still have some questions regarding which capture card to purchase for my needs.

Here's what I want to accomplish from the card:
1. Capture input from a VCR. S-Video and stereo audio preferred, mono OK.
2. Perform the compression to MPEG-1, and/or MPEG-2 using the hardware.
3. Not USB.

My assumptions (please correct if wrong).
1. Having the capture card perform the compression, accomplishes the task much faster than my Athlon XP 1800 would. Also, it frees computer resources for other tasks.
2. There's not much (if any) degredation of quality by using the capture card to compress to MPEG-1 or 2, instead of CPU & software (Premiere).

What is the "best" card, in your opinion, to accomplish this? I'd rather not buy more card than I need.

[Poplar]

I have yet to read a report on a hardware MPEG-1/2 capture card with reasonable price. There is some reviews on some of these cards in Tom's hardware site: http://www.tomshardware.com

The alternative is capture with lossless compression and software encoding. If you do it right, you can get excellent results. Such capture cards are very cheap, like Hauppauge WINTV card.

[shaady]

The alternative is capture with lossless compression and software encoding. If you do it right, you can get excellent results.

I know, but I'd rather do it quicker, and keep the computer avail for other tasks at the same time.