TV Tuner and Capture Card - MPEG-4??

[idfubar]

Does anyone have any suggestions for a TV Tuner/Video Capture Card? I'm in the market for one, and would like to take advantage of hardware MPEG-2 encoding at highest possible resolutions. CPU Speed and Memory should be no obstacle. I'll be running a RAID-0 array for storage, so 70KB/sec storage speeds are easily achievable (64K striping, 32K clusters)...

How does the ATI All-in-Wonder stack up (not the VE version, gotta have Stereo sound)...? What's the best "bang-for-the-buck"?

Also, is there any hardware that would allow me to encode directly to MPEG4 (DIVX format) - if not, how many steps is the process to do so? I've played around with Virtual Dub, FlaskMPEG, and other such programs - they're easy enough for me to use...

Any help or suggestions that you have are appreciated, as always =)

 

[spacemanspiffy]

bump im interested in this too

 

[scoobydooby]

Do you want a graphics card as well because that's what the all in wonder is. If you just want a tv tuner then look into the ATI TV Wonder. That's what I have, works pretty well. Doesn't encode into mpeg 4, only mpeg 2. Hope that helps.
Scoob

 

[tcrosson]

Well the Radeon 8500DV is a great card but it doesn't do hardware MPEG-2 encoding - it's all software based. Try Pinnacle for your MPEG-2 needs. They have MPEG-2 products for a wide variety of uses - from home use to pro - so it all depends on how much you want to spend.

Additionaly, Matrox's RT2500 is a great card - but again that gets really pricey for just DIVX movies.

I'd take a good look at Pinnacle's low end products - those should suffice for you.

As for anything that encodes straight to DIVX - I don't know of any. You might want to consider recording to AVI then encoding to MPEG-4. There are many ways to go about it. I believe it was tomshardsare.com that had a couple of articles on it that were really good reads. Hmmm... Or you can encode straight to MPEG-2 (with hardware assist of course) then just burn to that DVD-RW we've all been itching to buy.

[edit] I forgot to mention that a lot of those high end cards are meant more for editing then encoding - read through their features before you buy. (You'll also know which is for which when you look at the prices!)[/edit]

 

[imgod2u]

I'm not sure about ATI TV-Wonder's ability to assist in hardware encoding, however, if you're serious about encoding, hardware assistance really isn't the way to go. Encoding involves a vast array of formats and bitrates and hardware assistance for one format just isn't sufficient. I'd suggest investing in a faster system. The TV-Wonder is great for regular TV captures (unless you're doing high definition capture and DV). You can capture to a lossless compression (like HuffYUV) and then convert to whatever format you want later. Great quality. ATI's software captures in compression (mpeg or mpeg 2) pretty fast, but the quality isn't anything to wow you. VirtualDub with the ATI drivers installed should produce a much better quality video. Keep in mind that it uses regular coaxial cable wire or s-video, which are both interlaced, so the card captures a progressive 640x240 (half the normal video). This is fixable by a simple enlarge filter (with precise bicubic filters) and would produce a much better quality progressive video than any of ATI's interlacing software can do. Pinnacle makes a lot of high quality capture cards with high definition capture ability and FireWire to capture from DV cameras, but unless you're into that kind of high quality video, chances are you won't need it.