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

[Brian Keener]

>
> There's a couple of other factors here that I'm considering as 
> well...  I'm using an old STB TV-PCI that had a soft drink spilt on it 
> years ago; the TV tuner no longer works, and neither does audio 
> passthrough, for one thing, and I've always kept an eye out for a 
> decent replacement.  I bought the STB card in 1996, as I recall.
>
> That, combined with the fact that virtually all of my problems have 
> been capture-related issues, and not re-encoding issues, tends to make 
> me think picking up one of those Hauppauge cards for the initial 
> capture, and then running it through Mencoder might actually be the 
> way to go.
>
> Thanks for the advice.
>
> If I can get this working smoothly enough, my church has a library of 
> about 50 VHS cassettes they'd like to put on DVD.  Lucky me.
>
> Brian K

Whelp, I picked up a PVR-150 for 79 bucks at my local Circuit City, and
after a rough night of installation, it's working beautifully.

The quality from this board is pretty good, WORLDS better than even the
raw capture from my previous card (the STB), and being a hardware-based
encoder it uses just about zero cpu cycles.

My capture command is now basically just "cat /dev/video0 > output.mpg",
with zero complications, which is quite a relief from my mencoder/v4l
captures previously...

Brian K