I see a lot of discussion in this forum on DVD drives and such. I don't see any info on encoder cards, though. I've used virtually every software method possible to transcode video and I hate all of them. I'm looking into purchasing an encoder card to handle this process, but can't find any info on how well they work, which ones are best, etc. Does anyone have any experience with these, or could you perhaps point me in the right direction?
I haven't seen any articles on comparing the various hw encoders, but perhaps the others who have experience with them can join this thread. I use the Canopus Storm Encoder add-on for their DV capture board, capable of going from DV avi to mpeg1/mpeg2 in real-time. The quality is ok at high bitrates, but sw encoders seem to do a better job with VBR at low bitrates. This encoder isn't a bad thing to have for the price (around USD$200 in Japan) if you use their DV card because it can also spit-out m2v streams via the IEEE1394 port without any encoding. Nice for playback of archived mpeg2 archived DV video.
Are there any reasonably priced faster than realtime cards? I've seen a few cards that look interesting, but the info white papers on these websites leave much to be desired.
