Audigy 2 ZS Video Editor... Opinions?

[Rancid1]

Audigy 2 ZS Video Editor (http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=1&subcategory=204&product=11226)

Now, before someone slaps me... I am only recently getting into the A/V encode/decode/transcode hobby. And that being said, this product looked pretty interesting to me, what kind of quality and speed are there in similar priced products that are currently out on the market? Of course I realize that just about any hardware solution will beat a software solution hands down (unless the software developer is well... that good) in terms of efficiency and usually quality.

Opinions anyone?
I know ya have them. :P

[rfmmars]

It look good BUT I could not find any pricing or avalability for North America.

richard
photorecall.net

[leonid_makarovsky]

I don't have any experience with Creative products. All I know that their soundcards are aimed at gamers. When it comes to recording music, their products suck compared to pruducts from Terratec or M-Audio and up. Plus it is widely known that they have sort of deceptive advertisements. Given that and also the fact that they just started getting into recording music business and recording video department, I'm personally staying away from any product from Creative. There's Canopus with similar products that specilizes in that kind of stuff. But that's just my opinion. I'm sure I will get a lot of crap from many people here for insulting Creative soundcards. :)

--Leonid

[jggimi]

"Standalone" capture devices -- like TiVo, or like my Motorola DCT6208 (an HDTV cable box) can do an admirable job of capturing SDTV or HDTV.

But that's not what this box appears to be. It appears to be an outboard MPEG-2 hardware encoder with a USB connection, similar in function and capability to all the others.

The specifications section is telling. All of the informatio is about audio. Since it has SPDIF out, it may have advantages over other outboard devices.

But its very hard to tell. The only IEEE-1394 connection appears to be for DV capture and conversion to MPEG-2. And the specifications just call it a "4-pin DV port."

Why no FireWire connection to the PC? Probably because the MPEG-2/USB is OEM'ed from another vendor.

[RSVP]

Been looking into getting one of these myself. They are currently going for $250 MSRP. One review at http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20050608/index.html


There was also this bit of information from http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=video&message.id=144&query.id=0#M144

The Video Editor is a hardware DV codec and a hardware MPEG codec. Internally, the video processing chip takes a digital stream of CCIR656 video that was digitized from the Composite or S-Video input, assembles it into a video frame and does a DV compression (similar to JPEG compression), then passes it over USB 2.0 to the computer. It can also do MPEG1 and MPEG 2 compression on this stream or a DV stream from an DV camera. The capture modes supported in the hardware are:
Analog video to DV

Analog video to MPEG

DV to MPEG

DV to DV (passthrough)

So, your assertion that there is no hardware DV codec on the Video Editor is incorrect.



What I'd be very interested to hear is whether any PVR software works with this box, or even VirtualDub.