Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/18/2003, 10:57 AM
It’s hard to say what something is worth to you. The pro encoder is very, very good if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve tried a lot of them including TMPEGEnc which I thought was one of the best software encoders and the MainConcept pro encoder is so good I don’t use TMPGEnc any more. Only you can determine if it’s worth $99. I didn’t buy the pro encoder. I thought that it made more sense to apply that $99 toward upgrading to Vegas and getting a whole lot more than just the pro encoder (which is included with Vegas). But only you can determine if it’s worth it or if upgrading to Vegas is an option for you.

~jr
JimClark wrote on 5/19/2003, 1:34 PM
Thanks Johnny for the info. Can you give me a rundown on what is different inthe pro plugin? Like what settings can you change? Due to the type of videos I am working with (just home movie type) I have a hard time justifying the extra cost of Vegas. I am trying TMPGEnc and it seems to be doing a great job but it sure would be nice to just encode straight from video factory.
Thanks
Jim clark
discdude wrote on 5/19/2003, 3:18 PM
Jim, have you tried Satish's Frameserver plugin yet? The plugin + TMPGEnc is pretty close to the Mainconcept plugin experience.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/19/2003, 4:13 PM
To be quite honest, I did a whole bunch of tweaking when I first got it to see what results I could get and, in the end, I just use the default templates. So in essence, I’m only using $30 worth of the $99 encoder. ;-) You can manipulate things like the bitrate, the number of I,P, & B frames, the DC component precision, the quality of the audio, etc. just like in TMPGEnc. But I’ve found I really don’t need to. The standard templates do a fine job.

Having said that, the next question is why do you want to encode to MPG2? If it’s to make SVCD or DVD’s you’ll need a DVD authoring tool. Most of the ones I’ve seen come with an MPEG2 encoder. So before you spend the money on the MainConcept encoder, see how well your DVD authoring software encodes.

As discdude points out, you could try Satish’s Frameserver plugin which will allow you to render an MPEG file from programs like TMPGEnc without having to make an AVI file first.

~jr