What is the best hardware mpeg2 encoder card???

[Chumboy]

that does mpeg2

how about 2 categories:

1. under $500us
2. under $1000us

I have the Hollywood DV-Bridge external firewire that i hook up to my vcr. capture vcr to computer. it doesn't seem to keep up with the video stream and skips alot.

any suggestions?

[Scuba]

Dazzle DVC II and Pinnacle DC1000

[sumptor]

ATI All in Wonder 128 Pro is pretty good at hardware MPEG-2 capture. They've come out with newer cards since this one so they may be even better yet. I have the 128 Pro and have found it to be a stable and capable all around video card.

[Scuba]

Originally posted by sumptor
ATI All in Wonder 128 Pro is pretty good at hardware MPEG-2 capture. They've come out with newer cards since this one so they may be even better yet. I have the 128 Pro and have found it to be a stable and capable all around video card.

This are diferant ranges of cards.
The ATI is a Low level integrated card while the dazzle is a stand alone card, have very nice quality, and come with it's own editing program.
The Pinnacle are much more high end cards at the 1000$ range, working with Adobe Premier, Real time editing and such.

[Snike42]

I've been wondering if such a card would be usefull for vhs captures. Since most vhs sources are quite grainy they need some kind of smoothing. But is it possible to pre-process the signal (realtime)with such a card while it's encoding in mpeg2?

Post-processing in software would completely void the use of such a card.

Snike

[Scuba]

The main problem with VHS material is that the signal is almost allways broken in some way and that create audio sync problems when capturing over 30Min cut's
That can be normaly fixed with a TBC, Time base corrector.

If you want a real Pre-Filter you will have to shell some serius $$$.
Look at www.snellwilcox.com for more information. A good Pre-Filter can make the picture quality and smaller size much better with real time capturing cards that can't use 2 or 3 pass VBR encoding.

[Snike42]

Hmm.. thanks. I think I'll just stick to the caputure-and-leave-your-computer-coding-all-night method..

Snike