MPEG Compression Hardware

jgourd wrote on 5/21/2002, 8:12 AM

I have been looking for a board that will assist in MPEG-2 compression. All I have been able to find is capture cards.

Does anyone know of any MPEG-2 card that comes with a codec or stand alone application that can reduce MPEG compression time? Cost is really not a concern here. I would even be aggreeable to a multi-machine clustering MPEG engine if one is available.

I am sure I could find one for my Sparc, but I sold my Sparc a while ago so that is no longer an option.

Comments

PeterMac wrote on 5/21/2002, 9:23 AM

Doesn't Canopus do something like this - just brought it out?

Anyway, why do you want to go spending your money on things like that when you've got a world class encoder in Vegas :) ?

-Pete

jgourd wrote on 5/21/2002, 5:08 PM

The simple answer is speed. I do a lot of renders and some of them take several days.

swarrine wrote on 5/22/2002, 12:11 AM

Canopus does make a realtime mpeg-2 board. It is part of the Storm though. You plug the mpeg-2 board in to the Storm card. About $1,500 for everything including Storm, Premiere, mpeg-2 board and a bunch of software.

vonhosen wrote on 5/22/2002, 12:40 AM

As well as the Storm module there are the Pinnacle DC1000 & DC2000.

But they are all capture cards.....that's not what you are looking for right !

jgourd wrote on 5/22/2002, 4:28 AM

No, I have an MPEG-2 capture card. What I want is an MPEG compression accelerator DSP. All THe MPEG-2 compression software claims "Buy our wonderful software, it is cheaper than expensive hardware". They never ever come foreward and tell you which hardware they are refering to.

SonyEPM wrote on 5/22/2002, 11:34 AM

How does it look if you export to DV tape and suck it back in the with MPEG capture card?

jgourd wrote on 5/22/2002, 1:45 PM

Re-digitizing, yuck! I am not even going to try that.

Chienworks wrote on 5/22/2002, 1:58 PM

Wouldn't a hardware compressor be "redigitizing" too? SonicEPM's suggestion only involves one reencoding step, which would be performed by the hardware of the video capture card. Printing the DV avi file to the camera is lossless, and the analog video signal the camera will send back is vastly better than the MPEG that the video card will produce anyway.