[mythtv-users] Quality of Hardware vs. Software encoding

[Peter Sebastian Masny]

Hi all,

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but my search attempts have not 
been fruitful.  Basically I would like to know how hardware MPEG 2 
captures compare to software MPEG4 captures.  CPU usage is not an issue.

I capture video at 480x480 MPEG4 ,max quality 2, min 15 , diff 3 HQ 
enabled, 4MV enabled.

My bitrate is scaled to 3000 (so actually 2000)

Quality is pretty good, although I can tell that it is a little more 
blurry than the source and sometimes notice a few artifacts.

How does say a PVR250 compare to this.  From what I understand, the 
bitrate should probably be set around 8000 kb for good quality.  This is 
4 times as large as the software encoded streams, obviously to the 
software encoders advantage.


My question:
How does the quality compare between the software encoders and a 
hardware encoder such as the PVR-250?



Thanks,

Peter