Mpeg 2 Harware encoder

[hendo358]

What are the advantages of a capture card with a hardware Mpeg 2 encoder? I currently capture 720X480 avi uncompressed to an 80 GIG HD. I never capture mpegs. Is there anything I'm missing out on?

[D_Knife]

Pros
Speed - realtime compression
Small usage of disk space (especially compared to uncompressed)

Cons
quality
inflexible encoding

Hardware encoders can by definition only use single pass CBR or VBR encoding - obviously!
This single pass means that compared to almost any software encoder (with multiple passes) the quality will be less - more blocks

Inflexible encoding - you are limited to what the drivers provide, you may not want some of the options or bitrates

If your capturing uncompressed AVI and never capture mpeg then

no

you are probably not missing anything

[drdy111956]

I couldn't agree more. Bought WinTV PVR for direct MPG2 encoding, and have found the results to be grossly disppointing. Now I use this card to capture AVIs with VirtualDUb, edit and frameserve to TMPGEnc. Takes alot longer, but at least the result is a good quality SVCD.

[zamzickles]

I don't agree. I bought the WIN PVR and have been very pleased with the results, although I capture at 6 mbs and make DVDs from the captures. I find that most of the people that don't like this card's MPEG quality are those using LOW capture rates(<3mbs, VCD kind of stuff). And, if you use DSCALER with this card the output is quite incredable for a $200 card. I have a 61" HDTV and can see every little flaw in bad video, yet this card has produced great results for me GIVEN HIGH BIT RATE CAPTURE.

[SLK001]

A problem you have is the sheer size of HD that is required to capture AVI in real time (720 x 480 pixels/field x 3bytes/pixel (for real color) x 30field/sec x 3600 seconds/hour = 112GB per hour). At this rate, you are spitting stuff to the HD at a SUSTAINED 32 MByte/sec, which will tax most systems today. You can, of course, get superior results with this kind of resolution. However, the size of the HD is the main practicle limitation of this method.

I use a RealMagic DVR to capture MPEG2 at 9.5Mbps video and 384kbps audio, then transcode using CCE to more "normal" bit rates. Even so, an hour of capture at these bitrates is around 4GB. The results using my method is nothing less than supurb. I imagine that you would have results even better than mine.

[ENaMEL]

I have a Sigma(RealMagic) DVR hardware encoder and it's great. I mainly wanted the realtime encoding. When I capture from digital cable/satellite the quality is equal to what I can get from Tmpeg.

So, I haven't noticed a difference between the software encoder and hardware encoder, except the amazing time savings--which I the entire reason for purchasing a hardware encoder.

But others have stated that direct captures with this card aren't as good as tmpeg--all I can say to that is perhaps their source quality isn't the best and the wiring used isn't the greatest. I've presonally never had any problems.

I mean, what's the point of getting a great hardware encoder if you're gonnna use standard (read: cheap!) cables to deliver the source. After all you get what you pay for.

If you're happy with your current results and amount of time/effort necessary to get those results, then don't buy a hardware encoder. As all you'll really notice is time-savings.