How does TMPGENc stack up against Sonic's SD-500?

[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.

[DDogg]

You would have to provide much additional information for anybody to really be able to help. You are talking oranges and apples. A 50 buck software solution vs a 5000 buck hardware solution. I'm no expert except to say I would think you would have to have a very specific need to do that.

[Don R.]

No, dog, I don't need to supply additional info. This was a simple and straight forward question. Can't make it any more simple for you. Sorry if you don't understand.

[dani82]

1. feedback about whether you should buy tmpgenc or SD-500, or about SD-500 itself?

2. more info would help; if i'd asked, cce or tmpgenc for (s)vcd? they would ask what's my prefer bitrate, cause one does better at a lower bitrate and the other at a higher bitrate.

3. i don't think to many members here would pay 5k for a piece of hardware, so you probably won't get to much help (if any)

4. if you don't break-the-bank, go with SD-500, or the next best thing: tmpgenc or cce.

5. if you have the money to throw around, how about donating to Doom9? everything thousand dollar helps.:D

6. my opinion: unless SD-500's quality is far superior than tmpgenc,.....little help here people, can't remember how to end this?

[Mug Funky]

hardware is for realtime.

software is for "all the time in the world". that's probably going to be your main difference. i have no experience with hardware encoders, but i've seen them in action.

generally they're good if you're doing bucketloads of on-the-fly encoding in a large framework (like a monstrous rack of SDI cables and converterboxes, etc that DVD houses run on, all hooked into premaster machines, etc).

if you're doing home encoding you'll probably get almost if not just as good quality with TMPGenc, but i've not tested this..

the high price of hardware encoders comes from the context of their use - TV stations and DVD houses, where most applications are time critical and they make money directly off the machines.