Analog capture - is hardware encoding on the capture card still a benefit?

[jhyland]

Hello,
I plan to capture a bunch of analog content from old vhs tapes and a non-digital camcorder. My PC that I'm building has a 2500k cpu with the Z68 mobo. I understand that intel has done a great job incorporating video processing/encoding into the CPU. I know in years past the cheap capture cards did not have mpeg encoding in hardware. They relied on the cpu, which bogged the overall system down. Back then it was a really good idea to get the hardware encoding on the card. My question is if that still holds true given the 2500k's video processing capability. So do I go with cheaper card without hw encoding and rely on the 2500k or will I still benefit by having the encoding on the capture card? I also plan to capture analog cable through the cards tuner capability. Thanks.

 

[ulillillia]

The hardware encoding is generally best used with HD video. For SD video (720x480 or 720x576), it almost doesn't matter much. I'm using a TV tuner that doesn't have hardware encoding and I have no trouble with it. During recording into the MPG format, I was getting about 50% CPU usage with one core on my previous Core 2 Duo E8500 system. The 2500K should be about 50% faster meaning only 33% CPU usage on one core. The use of the H.264 codec really makes things even more effective, since it's highly threaded.