Capture and compress in MPEG2 in real-time

[liero]

Hello,

I would like to code a software in VB.NET with the help of Matrox Imaging Library (or not, I don't care) which can capture a video stream, print it to the screen and compress in MPEG2 (used for DVD) in the same time.
I try some solution but no one is acceptable (in quality or performance).
Could you help me to find a solution ?
Thanks.

P.S. : I'm French so please excuse me for my bad english ;)

[Mug Funky]

i've done similar with VLC player - it'll grab from any dshow compatible capture source and compress to mpeg-2 in realtime plus playback of decoded stream.

on a decent machine (my athlon 64 3500+, @ 2200 clocks) you'll get about 30-50% CPU usage doing all this, and you might even be able to browse the interweb at the same time.

not sure if this suits your task exactly - it's tricky to set up, and the mpeg-2 encoder is ffmpeg, which needs severe tweakage to get reliable ratecontrol (ie. DVD compliant bitrate).

of course you could buy one of these:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=109827

but you'll need SDI and AES/EBU capable equipment which costs $$$

:)

[olyteddy]

Or get a hardware encoding card such as the Hauppauge PVR ones. Some of them use the same (Conexant) encoder chip that the big commercial encoders use.

[liero]

Thanks Mug Funky but, in fact, I must write some text in overlay on the image before converting to MPEG2.
A really nice application would be a software which could create a MPEG2 file with a sequence of images (given one by one). I don't know if this kind of application exists ...
I will try the hardware solution but I hope I can use this with API because all operation must be done with VB.NET