WMV hardware encoder

[mcleaver]

There are now several boxes on the market able to encode MPEG 1, MPEG 2 and DivX MPEG 4 in hardware and pass on the result through the USB to port. But so far I have not seen any capable of encoding directly in hardware to WMV (at least not under $2000). Are there any such boxes on the market? Or are any expected in the near future?
regards
Martin

[Fantasma]

Hello,

I doubt you will see a hardware encoder for Microsoft crappy Video format, at least not home users like us, in addition, microsoft is not a hardware vendor, it is a software vendor, they have tried to create a game console, but in fact is just another PC.

But who knows, some idiot said that 64 kilobytes of ram would be enough for any computer task and see what happened.

[mcleaver]

Originally posted by Fantasma
I doubt you will see a hardware encoder for Microsoft crappy Video format
What's wrong with the wmv format?
Rgds
Martin

[Sergei_Esenin]

Originally posted by mcleaver
What's wrong with the wmv format?

He obviously hates Microsoft, but there's nothing qualitatively inferior about their WMV9 (a.k.a. VC1) codec. Its quality is roughly equal to MPEG-4 ASP, though not equal to MPEG-4 AVC (at least not in the current MS encoder). If it were an inferior codec it wouldn't be a mandated part of HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards which will supercede DVD.

BTW, the .wmv container format isn't the same as the Windows Media 9 codec, just to be clear to some who may get confused. You can even put WM9 video into AVI format, not strictly WMV format.