Mainstream S/W to take full advantage of ATI 550 PRO H/W encoding

[inspiron2]

Hi,

I own three (3) ATI TV Wonder Elite boards (550 Pro). Currently I am using them in my XP MCE HTPC, Vista Premium PC, and a video capture/processing PC.

I have read quite a bit on these forums, and it appears that (with respect to video capture from analog sources)

- The S/W (i.e. PowerCinema) that ships with these boards is s***s.
- One needs gbPVR or ChrisTV to make use of hardware encoding offered by this excellent card.

I want to use a package specifically made for video capture/editing. For example: Premier, or WinDVD, etc. I didn't read anything suggesting that any software packages--other than the two TV watching ones listed above (i.e. gbPVR and ChrisTV)--can make use of H/W encoding offered by 550 PRO card or not. Can someone please let me know of a popular video edit/capture package that can use 550 Pro H/W encoding? If there is none, is there a quality penalty for bypassing it's H/W encoding?

(BTW, I will be capturing video from Hi8 and VHS sources)

THANKS A LOT!

regards,

[SHS]

Your only option is ChrisTV for Caputring only and Womble MPEG-VCR or Womble Video Wizard DVD or VideoReDo for editing.
For I know of there no package specifically made for video capture/editing with Hardware Encoder other then Hauppauge WinTV-PVR which used a plug-in driver for Ulead DVD MovieFactory which didn't work well at editing any way.

[lordsmurf]

If you want an NLE card, then buy an NLE card:

- Canopus cards capture to Grass Valley Edius. Canopus used to make the DVStorm cards, but no idea what the line's name is now (if it still exists). Go look at the thomsongrassvalley.com site.

- Matrox cards capture to Adobe Premiere. The RT.X series is the one that would capture to Premiere Pro.

The ATI capture cards are great at what they do, but they're still a step below being an NLE card.