On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 13:43:53 +0800, spodosaurus
wrote:

Ben Thomas wrote:
Hi all,

I have been trying to turn my MiniDV home videos into DVDs but it takes
many hours to encode the MPEG for the DVD on my AMD Athlon XP 2700+ with
512MB RAM and 7200RPM hard disk, using Ulead VideoStudio. It seems to
take even longer to convert MPEG2 (captured from my digital TV card)
into MPEG2 suitable for DVD. I'm guessing CPU is the main problem and
there aren't many faster CPU alternatives but please correct me if I'm
wrong.

So can I get a PCI card that will do the job for me?
I've recently been researching something very similar to this. Do to
other equipment needed, (CPU upgrade from Athlon 1700+, VCR, new video
card, etc) we opted for a software based encoder as our needs were
pretty basic. However, there were two hardware based encoders that I was
seriously looking at:
Leadtek Winfast PVR 2000:
http://www.leadtek.com.tw/eng/tv_tun...6&pronameid=91

Actually, I've got one of these (well, the DV2000 version which comes
with the 3x Firewire ports on top of the basic spec).

The thing is, it's not really a hardware encoder : Although the
Conexant chip is pretty powerful, the one used in the PVR isn't the
one with the hardware encoding capabilities AFAIK (love to be proved
wrong - if the Linux crew have a hardware MPEG encode driver for it,
that'd be great !!!)

So in reality you get the Winfast software which is ahem quirky as
hell, even if it works most of the time. For comparison purposes, I
can *nearly* encode realtime PAL 720x576 @ 25fps from the Winfast TV
card, on an Athlon 1700 + 384 Meg to MPEG2 with a small amount of
frame skipping

But I can't to MPEG4 or WMV9 because of the higher compression needed,
which in turn requires higher levels of CPU for transcoding the files.

However, encoding from a DV input is actually much easier. Any modern
disk can keep up with 25mbps for DV-AVI. So, always try to go down the
DV route if you can - keep the source files as DV-AVI for as long as
possible (editing and so on) if you're concerned purely about the CPU
usage with this card.

Cheers - Neil