are there hardware h.264 encoder sample collections out there?

[plonk420]

are there any hardware/asic encoders out there that even somewhat approach the upper half of x264's quality out there? and if so are there any samples, hopefully of commonly encoded test footage (or footage you can do encode tests yourself)? or better yet, collections of samples from multiple models, vendors?

[Blue_MiSfit]

I doubt there are good collections of this kind of thing.

I'll say that yes, generally hardware encoders can be quite good these days, especially from well regarded companies like Ateme and Harmonic.

It kind of depends what you mean by hardware tho. Most hardware encoders are for live encoding, and many actually run on x86 these days.

Do you specifically mean live encoders, or do you mean hardware as in "must be on an asic / fpga" and may be live or vod?

[plonk420]

i'll take any and all samples, from live encoders or not (just as long as they run at decent speeds). the more popular/"common" the better. just trying to see a range of what's out there

[benjaminlilijun]

are there any hardware/asic encoders out there that even somewhat approach the upper half of x264's quality out there? and if so are there any samples, hopefully of commonly encoded test footage (or footage you can do encode tests yourself)? or better yet, collections of samples from multiple models, vendors?

I think so, Broadcom has video transcode - ASIC (so encode yes) solution, which video quality is ~10%(PSNR) behind x264 medium preset at the same bitrate.
Also, Socionext solution (ASIC) may have even better video quality but price is even higher.
And GPU - Nivida solutions should be also good enough.
It depends on your application , personal usage, casual usage or high volume transcoding/encode , you can choose different solution which is best for you, balance the cost and quality, and speed.