Right now i'm using tmpgenc to convert DV .avi files on my computer. This works great but..... it takes forever to convert them to svcd. So in the interest of saving time i'm looking into getting an offline hardware encoder. Yes i know that you can use this card to capture video, i'm interested in that as well but a great plus would be to use it as an offline card as i have lots of .avi files already on my hard drive....

Has anyone had any experience with this card? So far it looks good (< $200) and the review at http://steve.kittelsen.com/pv256c looks promising... thanks steve! :D

How would you compare the quality of an SVCD created with card versus tmpgenc or cce? When you capture what settings are the best? Also i'd like to know if you can use this card as an "Offline" encoder ( i.e. can i feed this card an existing .avi file on my hard drive and have it produce an SVCD)?