Using a hardware encoder/capture card for transcoding?

[drbuzz0]

I hope this question has not been posted before, but I'm wondering if there is any way to use the "hardware encoding" capabilities of any capture cards for the purpose of transcoding video. Transcoding is obviously a very CPU-intensive task, but many avaliable capture cards feature onboard hardware for compressing captured video. A few even have hardware based mpeg4-AVC/H.264 encoding.

I'm wondering if there is any way that an internal video stream could somehow be mapped back to the card and exploit this hardware for the purpose of transcoding it, such as when editing it etc.

The only one that seems to do anything like that is the "Firecoder" by Canopus, but I'm not even sure of that one and it looks like it doesn't support AVC, which is generally my preferred video codec.

[Comatose]

Well, maybe you could build your own graph... but I doubt it. It seems the (filteR) connections between the hardware encoder and the inputs won't work if you connect something else.
It has to come from the card itself :x

But who knows. Your best bet would be to find somebody with a Hauppauge HD PVR (which encodes to H.264) and have them try it.

[drbuzz0]

Well, maybe you could build your own graph... but I doubt it. It seems the (filteR) connections between the hardware encoder and the inputs won't work if you connect something else.
It has to come from the card itself :x

But who knows. Your best bet would be to find somebody with a Hauppauge HD PVR (which encodes to H.264) and have them try it.

Hmm. I'll have to look into that. I guess a video out connected to the capture card with a jumped would work but that'd be a horrible way to do it and just about defeat the whole purpose!