Sonic SD-500 MPEG Hardware Encoder

[Don R.]

Does anyone have experience with Sonic's SD-500 MPEG encoder?

Thinking about installing one here but would like some feed back from users before making the investment.

[SurfDrifter]

I'm using SD-1000 and the quality is very good.

You'll be using Sonic's DVD Producer for capturing, but you should know that it only captures to MPEG. Also, it accepts ONLY digital input and you cannot just capture from a source WITHOUT timecode and remote(i.e a BETA or DVCPRO player that can be remoted).
So, even with an analogue-to-digital convertor, remote capability of the player is required. There are some workarounds for capturing, for example, a VHS tape, but still you'll need a beta player for the timecode input.

The quality of SD-1000 is very good and various bugs were fixed with version 3.5.2 patch.

Actually it dependes on what you want to do.
So, maybe a DVStorm2 could work for you