Best MPEG2 Encoder Out there?

[tdalton]

I know some people who encode a great deal of analog content and have tested virtually every card on the market. The general consensus I get is that none of the current PCI capture cards stand up to the outdated and not to mention defunct company Silicon Graphics 320 workstation. I am curious if anyone else here has had a similar experience working with an SGI 320 or another solution that you feel that has the best analog capturing capabilities. Of course encoding in general is the one major weakness I see in the otherwise superior model of SageTV vs. Tivo. If a DTV tuner card comes out (fat chance!) that would dump the datastream to the HD instead of capturing it that would be the ultimate Tivo killer hence is why we'll probably never see that. Thanks for your input.

TD

[mikejaner]

Hauppauge is the Generally accepted "Best Encoder" out there. I have no doubt there are better ones out there, but they are probably in the professional encoder market. Those cards seem to be in the $1000 and higher range, and make the purchase not worth it for the difference in quality. I have never seen the SGI 320, does it do hardware based encoding? I agree with you on a Dtv based tuner card. That would kill Tivo in a heartbeat.

[Opus4]

Originally posted by tdalton
I know some people who encode a great deal of analog content and have tested virtually every card on the market. The general consensus I get is that none of the current PCI capture cards stand up to the outdated and not to mention defunct company Silicon Graphics 320 workstation. ... Of course encoding in general is the one major weakness I see in the otherwise superior model of SageTV vs. Tivo.

I'm curious... how are the recordings being played? From others' comments around here, the playback quality of software decoders going through normal video cards' svideo outputs leaves a bit to be desired, unless you spend a bit of time trying to tweak everything to get the best quality you can get with that type of playback. On the other hand, those same files played through a hardware decoder, such as the Hauppauge 350 or an Xcard, look very good w/o a lot of extra work.

So... how were those SGI 320 workstations decoding the files? Hardware?

- Andy

[kny3twalker]

I think support for the Xcard OSD (maybe you could include MVP and the current pvr 350) could also be a TiVo killer

[tdalton]

I just found out the SGI320 has software mpeg encoding. But what I just found out changes things quite a bit. What they do is capture to huffyuv which is lossless then they compress it. The end result mpges are superior to that of an mpeg generated from a pvr-250 but again the process to get there is manual and more involved. You can see the difference right on your computer screen so output is irrelevant. The bottom line is that I look forward to the day when pvr captures are every bit as good as the source feed be it either by a data stream dump or whatever it's got to be on the horizon.

TD