Effect of graphics cards on MPEG2 -> WMV encoding.

[Larkin78]

This may be a stupid question but what difference would you expect the graphics card to make on a system being used to convert mpeg to wmv8 (via windows media encoder)? Say a dedicated high end card versus on board graphics?

I have a machine that wasn't really built for media playback but can play dvd's, divx and wmv files fine. The CPU load will be very high and it may stutter at points but for an encoding session (which involves the machine decoding the mpeg2 and then encoding again to wmv) I'm assuming there won't be any loss of quality as it's not happening in real time. If anything it should just run slower, right?

[CWR03]

This may be a stupid question but what difference would you expect the graphics card to make on a system being used to convert mpeg to wmv8 (via windows media encoder)?
The graphics processor is not used in encoding. There would be no difference.
I'm assuming there won't be any loss of quality as it's not happening in real time.
If you mean quality loss of the file due to encoding, yes, there's always a loss when converting to WMV. If you mean from the video card, no.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Right. Every time you encode with a lossy codec like MPEG anything, WMV, etc... you will always loose quality. Hence the word lossy

And video cards make no difference in encoding speed whatsoever - until x264-3dgpu exists :)

~MiSfit