MPEG-2 encoding done by hardware or software??

[eP?]

I was just wondering which is needed for the encoding to happen? And can anyone recommend a good tool to do so?

Thanks

 

[Hanky]

Well, if you have a WinTV PVR, MPEG2 capturing and encoding will be done by hardware.
The other possibility is to use a software encoder, for example TMPGEnc, which is freeware as far as I know. The best software encoder AFAIK is the Cinemacraft Encoder, but you'll only find an evaluation version at their website.
For a test of various encoders, look here

 

[ManuTOmanU]

BTW do those en and decode... from AVI to MPEG and vise versa???

 

[corbet]

Doesn't the Asus v7700 have Mpeg-2 hardware encoding? I'm trying to figure out whether to buy this card with my system (which is very similar to yours),and I'm not too happy with Asus' users manual lack of description. Under Video Capture and editing, can you only capture an .AVI file and edit only .AVI files as well? Is your system crashing at all? - Have you captured anything?

Thanks

 

[Hanky]

ManuTOmanU,

I think they only encode. Decoding is a bit more complicated and that's basically what you have to do if you want to rip DVDs as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, I'm also new when it comes to "handling" MPEG2 and ripping DVDs is not my area, I'm only capturing TV...

corbet,

I very seriously doubt the ASUS card as hardware MPEG2 encoding. It woudl be the ULTIMATE card for its price if it had this feature...the WinTV PVR costs $150-200 or so (don't know the exact US prices, just "translated" the German ones) more than the standard version and it only has MPEG2 encoding as an additional feature.
Furthermore...if you mean me with your questions regarding Video capturing, the answer is I'm capturing all the time right now because I want to use my PC as a full VCR in the future, but I'm still in the experimental phase. I only captured to AVI by using the DivX codec till last week. But I plan to switch to the SVCD standard because I want to watch the stuff in the "PC-less" living room by using a stand-alone DVD/VCD player. So I need MPEG2 encoding. Right now I'm experimenting with MJPEG capturing using the Pic Video codec. Capturing and editing the AVI-File is done with the great freeware program Virtualdub. Then I have to encode it with a MPEG2 encoder (using TMPGEnc right now).
And my system is not crashing. Oops, did I say that... 🙂

 

[ManuTOmanU]

wazzaby... you are from Germany too???

WoW I am from there too... are you on ICQ???

let me know...

BTW thanx... a lot...

where did you see the wintv pvr for 200?

It is more like 250 or so???

 

[Hanky]

Yes, I'm from Germany and I'll let you know of my ICQ number.

You're right, the PVR costs $250 rather than $200 (you get it for a bit more than 500 DM @ FortKnox or Alternate), I only said it costs roughly $200 more than the standard version.

 

[jpprod]

All Asus GeForce Deluxe cards have only video input capability on hardware. All video encoding is done on software on these cards. Bundled software called Ulead video studio can do MPEG2 software encoding if CPU's up to the task.

My Athlon 800MHz can do 320x240/30FPS at reasonable quality without too many frame drops, but full PAL/NTSC resolution is an another story 🙂

 

[ManuTOmanU]

why don't you just publish ur ICQ here...?

Ok... read over it... true your right... sorry...

Don't accpect too much of realtime software decoding... this is a problem...

It takes forever to do it at reasonable quality and uses a lot of your CPU (remember not realtime!!!)