[MEncoder-users] Mencoder vs. hardware based devices...

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 10:17:54PM -0400, Brian Keener wrote:
> I've achieved fairly consistent and good quality with Mencoder, at this 
> point.  My disk space restricts me to capturing at 352x480 or 352x240 
> (depending on length).
> 
> I was looking at new hard drives at my local store, and I saw some 
> inexpensive PVR devices (PVR-250 and PVR-150 from Hauppauge), and the 
> thought crossed my mind that they might be adequate for my purposes.
> 
> Can mencoder give significantly better quality than one of these 
> stand-alone devices?

At 352x240, most definitely not.

> I'm not looking for perfection; I'm only interested in encoding some 
> children's VHS movies, old family videos, etc.

Don't throw away the VHS anytime soon unless you're planning on
getting a much better encoding setup. The encodes you're making will
rather suck, but they should be considerably better with a good
dedicated mpeg2 encoder board capturing full resolution. AFAIK the
Hauppauge cards are good, much better than bttv boards anyway.

Rich