A good cheap hardware encoder (like ATI MMC)

[mvdude2001]

I need one because I just bought a promo music video for Fat Lip by sum 41 from eBay and I want to capture it for my music video vcd.

[Greg12]

cheap and hardware encoders to not mix.

the cheapest one i know is 800 us dollars.

[patrickm]

ATI's not a hardware encoder, but if you have a fast system (say 800+ non-celeron) the quality at SVCD is excellent. (because of the different type of artifacts, better in my opinion than TMPG. ATI has more 'JPG mosquito' effects, TMPG has more macroblocks. and visually, mosquitos disappear at a shorter distance too). i'd recommend the All-in-wonder 128 Pro 32M AGP. you can get them for like $100 now, and they have all the video capability of the AIW radeon, just not quite as good 3D.

(the VCD quality of ATI is ok, but not as good as TMPG, because that's just too much compression to do well in realtime software, and too many high-frequency noise effects are present)

[patrickm]

also, i think the winTV PVR is a hardware encoder (though not a great one), and same goes for some of the Dazzle products, though supposedly there's issues with some AMD/VIA setups with those. (newer AMD/VIA boards are fine i think). both of those run in the ~$300 range