Capture card with hardware encoding for WMV Windows Media?

[Rally1]

I see cards that offer hardware encoding for MPEG, thereby reducing the amout of work your CPU has to do. Are there cards that take some of the load when encoding WMV?
My searches have found a couple that do (or claim they do):
http://www.tarari.com/products-digitalmedia.html
A couple digital river cards, and some mention that maybe the Osprey 500 would.

Now granted, I don't understand the hardware issues involved, but it seems strange to me that there are not more offerings for "WMV cards", as WMV is so common.

At the same time I need the device to be PCMCIA or USB2. Since it appears there is no such thing as a WMV hardware encoding solution, does that mean I can use any (cheap crappy) USB/PCMCIA capture device if I am exclusively encoding WMV?

[drjtech]

For one thing, they would have to get permission from Microsoft and pay through the nose for licensing. Then, of course, they would have to choose which of the many wmv "standards" to use.

http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/wmv.cfm

WMV stands for Windows Media Video -- developed and controlled by Microsoft. WMV is a generic name of Microsoft's video encoding solutions and doesn't necessarily define the technology what it uses -- since version 7 (WMV7) Microsoft has used its own flavour of MPEG-4 video encoding technology (not very surprising, it's not compatible with other MPEG-4 technologies..).

-drj

[Rally1]

Fair enough. So there is no card that helps with encoding to (one of the) WMV standards.

It kind of makes sense I guess, Microsoft = software -> software encoding.

[SHS]

Is there any Hardware WMV Encoding there are a few but they cost you $5,000+.
Beside why you so gun ho over WMV any way when useful on PC playback only unlike MPEG2 where you can build up DVD disc and playback on lot more device.

[Sulik]

Actually, the latest AIW cards appears to allow WMV encode acceleration when creating custom presets with MMC 9.08.

[greymalkin]

yep..too bad i shot myself in the foot and got the theater 550.



Every feature I loved about my AIW 9000 is now lost.

[Rally1]

"Beside why you so gun ho over WMV" because I am streaming.

Thanks for the info on the AllInWonder cards.