Is there such a thing...

[CFster]

Is there such a thing as a firewire card that does hardware MPEG encoding?

[Cobra]

CFster,

Not sure if this is sort of what you're after:

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3...duct_uid=30441

Product info:

http://www.pinnaclesys.com/ProductPage_n.asp?Product_ID=470&Langue_ID=2

This is for you, if you don't mind capturing and then encoding. It's definitely kinder to your wallet, and probably going to yeild better quality because your PC can spend a lot more time and perform multiple passes encoding your final MPEG file as opposed to rushing it "on-the-fly".

The other product I found was this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3...duct_uid=12356

Product info:

http://www.hauppauge.com/html/dvb_s.htm

It's more expensive, and I don't know if it's any good as it doesn't support IEEE1394.

That's as close as I can come. Hope it helps.

CobraDMX

[CFster]

Thanks.

The first card just looks like a regular Firewire card with capture software included.

I'm wondering if there's a firewire capture card that will receive the DV signal, convert it to MPEG2 on the fly and deposit it on your hard drive.

If not, then somebody should build one!

[teegee420]

That does sound like a good idea. However in the meantime, why not use your cam's A/V outs with one of those USB 2.0 mpeg-2 capture devices? Not the same quality as DV-out but it might fit the bill for you.

[CFster]

Because the cam and the DirecTivo it's plugged into are on the oposite end of the house. I ran firewire all the way over to my PC. The thing being that there's no signal loss whatsoever with firewire, vs. 50 ft of S-Video and RCA audio cables. Plus, it was easier to run one wire instead of three. I use an IR blaster to control the Tivo from my office and watch it or record it on the PC.

The video quality is excellent (what I was looking for), I'm just sick of waiting for TMPGEnc to do the conversion to MPEG2.

I can't believe there's not a card to do this. There's plenty of people out there (professonial or not) recording off a DV signal.

I see plenty of cards out there that claim to be Firewire with MPEG2 encoding but in fact they encode with the included software.

[Cobra]

Perhaps to encode to MPEG2 to any decent quality in real time with hardware encoders is prohibitively expensive for the general market. The obvious option for the companies is to sell a card that capures then make software do the work for them.

If they made a hardware MPEG2 capture card costing, say £300, with £50 profit, they would sell X products and recieve Y amount of profit.

If they made a hardware capture card that used software encoding, and this costs £40, with £10 profit, they can sell Z products and recieve B amount of profit.

For mass market penetration, a product must be economically priced.

If Y > B then it's the expensive card option.
If Y < B then it's the software option.

That's not taking into account economies of scale - bulk buying, continuous production lines etc. making it even less commercially viable to make a mass production card of this nature. Also, it takes time and money to generate a product like this, and companies will want a good return on it. If this isn't going to happen, then nor does the product.

Perhaps that's why there's a bit of a lack of these cards - nobody will make them as they won't make enough profit.

Or maybe I am completely wrong - I'm only taking a bit of a guess here!

CobraDMX

[CFster]

:P I'd buy one!

So we're talking about a hardware MPEG2 encoder chip which is already integrated into many capture cards.

This card would have to do less than those cards as it wouldn't have to do the analog - digital conversion.

They sell firewire cards for $14 now. How much would it cost to put that chip on one of those, and some software to dump it on the disk? I'd pay $200 - I'm sure of it.

[Cobra]

Here's a card that will capture through FireWire and encode right into MPEG2 (from what I can see):

Model you're after: RT.X100

http://www.dvc.uk.com/guides/lev1.php?subnav=dvd&lev1=encodingdvds

CobraDMX

[CFster]

Yikes!!!

That's pricey...