"Cheap" MPEG-2 ENCODING card? Trash or worth the c

[pharries]

Anyone had any experience with the Digital Multimedia Solutions MPEG-2 Hardware Encoder/Decoder with DV input
Is this trash or worth the cash?
http://www.mpegav.co.uk/html/mpeg-2_dv.html

[Barnabas]

Hi,

I don't see what encoding chip this unit has, but from the looks of the specs, this card is exactly like the provideo PV-256CDV. That card uses a Stream Machine encoding chipset.

The ADS Instant DVD uses the same chipset, but gave me nothing but troubles, but that's more due to the fact that ADS does not capture audio on the device but uses your sound card. Most users of the ADS instant DVD report trouble cutting files without losing sync. Don't know if that's due to the chipset or not, so that might or might not be a problem with this card.

The Hauppauge PVR-250 is also a nice Hardware encoding card for the money. It has an IVAC compression chip, and does not seem to run into audio sync problems with cutting.