[Tyler McAdams]

What's the fastest hardware for encoding?
I'm looking for the fastest way to encode mpeg-2 on a mac/pc... What pci cards do you guys recommend? Further, is there a software/hardware combination you guys find fastest or best? In most basic terms, I'm looking for a pci card... something like Cleaner5's old mpeg supercharger package (which is not sold anymore, by the way) that I can dedicate my encoding to. Money is not really an object, so it can be as exotic as you know of as long as it's not a turnkey system, but a component I can drop in my mac or pc...

[mofu]

Are you looking for faster than real-time? Not sure if there is such a thing in hardware. . .

For DV to MPEG2 I found this on Ebay.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tem=2073003969

Not my auction, I know nothing about it.

Here's a board designed for a Linux TV project using external composite and audio:

http://linuxtv.org/mpeg2/kfir.xml

[709]

Tyler -

Have you checked out the Heuris software? It's not hardware accelerated but seems pretty fast. The quality of output is outstanding. Better than Terran's (or Discreet's) MPEG-2 by far. Quality vs. Speed. The never ending battle.

[Steve SpotOn]

I believe the MediaPress card is very good for real time encoding ... have a look here:
http://all4dvd.com/products/wiredmediapress.asp

I also believe that Discreet Cleaner is the best for quality in that you can get it to assess your original material before you encode.... but it takes time!

As 709 said "quality vs. speed!!!"

[Tyler McAdams]

You've given me some really interesting things to look at... It's obvious at this point I need to do some saving cause these things are expensive! Anyhow, thanks.