On Tue, 21 Nov 2006 17:37:24 GMT, "Mattrixx"
<someone@nowhere.com> wrote:


>On another note, with a dual core X2 3800+ CPU, how much more important is
>it for hardware compression/decompression encoding on a capture device vrs
>software?


It depends on how demanding your other simultaneous system
uses will be.

You could capture to software MPEG2 without ever noticing
it, though a slight bit more sluggish hard drive response if
you only had one hard drive in the system- though ideally
you will have a second drive no matter which capture card if
you have simultaneous use needs.

If you can settle for always capturing to MPEG2, I'd go with
the hardware encoding card(s). If you instead plan on
another codec, perhaps lossless compression for editing
later, or higher compression for best use of storage space,
you may as well save a few bucks and get a software
compressor type card. Some are known to support more codecs
like Divx... The Winfast 2000XP Expert can do this while
many cards can't... or at least couldn't in the past, I'd
expect the various versions of MPEG4 beyond WMV to be better
supported now and in the future than in the past.

With MPEG4 variants encoding, expect to have one of your
dual cores completely occupied (or at least enough to
consider it occupied for practical purposes).

As for choice of codec, consider what your set-top player
can support, or where you'd store them. Given that a HTPC
can play back most anything it can record, if you'll only
need the HTPC for playback you have a lot more options.