Anybody knows a H/W MPEG-2 Encoder card (Not for capture)

[SaSi]

There are a lot of MPEG-2 capture cards, i.e. cards that take analog video and create MPEG-2 streams. I have not been able to find any that can (with appropriate s/w) be fed with a stream of uncompressed frames from an AVI file and encode them creating an MPEG-2 stream.

Sort of like a numeric co-processor to accelerate the encoding.

As all these capture cards are based on specific MPEG-2 encoder chips, I am wondering why I have not found any implementation to do AVI->MPEG-2 conversion within the PC.

Anybody knows of such a solution?

[Cornucopia]

Not precisely what you're looking for, but I've got a Canopus MPEG Encoder card, which is a snap-on daughter-type card that works with the DVStorm (Analog/Firewire) card and system. It's the successor to the "Amber" card they use to sell with DVD Maestro/Virtuoso. (Cool way to buy into that ). You don't have to capture, although you can if you want, you would just tell Premiere or similar app to export to MPEG via that setting/codec and it'll do it. Very nice. I use it alot unless I want to spend the extra time with CCE or TMPEnc doing multiple-pass VBR, (The card can't do that-just singlepass VBR or CBR) so when I need the ultimate in quality I don't use it.
It ain't cheap and it requires the main Canopus card to work. Still a good deal when time is of the essence, 'cuz it's speeedy.

Scott

[SaSi]

I agree it may not be exactly what I had in mind. However, as you say, it's fast. How fast is this? Can you give me encode time for, say 1 minute video, by the card and by CCE? Also, what speed is your CPU? Just want to understand how faster such cards are compared with P4 machines.

[Cornucopia]

StormEncoder card costs ~$350 US. Encoding is billed as "Realtime" but it's a tiny bit more, say 1.1:1. So a 5 minute clip would take ~5min30sec to encode (either CBR or 1passVBR).
This is done using the hardware of the card and so it works at that speed regardless of the speed of your CPU. This means that in time it will be less desirable as CPU speeds continue to jump in speed. Good thing is you don't HAVE to have it in a fast computer. On some fast CPU's this time has been equalled by CCE or TMPGEnc or Ligos, but it varies depending on content and the amount of processing/filtering done, whereas the StormEncoder varies very little.

Scott

[darkufo]

Yep, the DV Storm 2 card is excellent. You can capture from any source ie dvd, tv,satellite, video, camcorder and it creates the mpeg file directly. Also works v.well with premiere and has realtime effects and tranisitions and speeds up the who encode process dramatically.