[mythtv-users] Kinda off-topic mpeg encoder question

Ed Benckert ed at ebonmists.com
Fri Mar 26 09:20:06 EST 2004


Since there's a lot of mpeg encoder knowledge on this list, figured I'd 
ask... does anyone know of a HARDWARE mpeg encoder that can encode a video 
stream that is NOT coming in from it's tuner? I know a lot of cards like the 
PVR350 and the like will hardware encode mpeg2 that comes in from it's 
tuner, but what I want to do is take an AVI on my hard drive, and convert it 
to mpeg2. I know I can do this with software conversion, but it takes hours 
to convert a 90 minute avi.

I had considered 'playing' the avi out one video card, and encoding it back 
into a pvr350 card (or something similar) but there's obvious loss of 
quality when you do it that way.

Does anyone know of a hardware encoder that a program like TMPEGEnc or other 
video encoding software can utilize? I thought I saw one in a tiger direct 
catalog once, but I cannot find it anywhere now.

Worse case scenario, I'll do the out-then-back-in method, but that's just 
sloppy if you ask me.

The whole reason I want to do this is to compress AVI's I have from home 
video (DV capture of wedding videos, family videos etc), and convert them to 
mpgs so I can view them in MythVideo and not take up 4 gigs of disk space 
for 20 minutes of DVD quality video... encoding it to mpg would save massive 
amounts of space, and although I CAN do it software, like I said... it takes 
about 6 hours on my 2ghz processor to encode about 90 minutes of avi.

Thanks


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list