Anybody Tried MainConcept's H.264 Encoder V2?

[Jerry Jones]

Has anybody tried MainConcept's H.264 Encoder V2?

http://tinyurl.com/y8vhhm

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Dr Mordrid]

Tons of settings & relatively fast as H.264 encoders go. Does more than H.264 though as it also has all the features of their MPEG-1/2 encoder complete with TV tuner, capture engine (DirectShow), chapter cues etc.

No matter what encoder you use it's extremely helpful to have a display card with hardware H.264 decoding. ATI X1000 AVIVO series, latest NVIDIA G-Force 6/7, MB's with integrated nForce 6150 GPU's etc. Otherwise it takes tons of system resources to even play H.264 badly. Fat PCIe pipes also help.

I have 3 ATI X-series PCIe cards and they work very nicely for H.264 playback. Thing is they also can run ATI's free AVIVO Video Converter, which can encode H.264 among other things like DivX and 'normal' MPEG. It passes the encoding threads off to the GPU's programmable pixel shaders, which do it faster than the CPU.

Not as many settings as MC but faster.

[Jerry Jones]

Are there any EXTERNAL display cards that will work?



Or is a laptop person forced to go back to PCI > DESKTOP computing?

I formerly preferred desktop computers when laptops weren't so great.

But today's laptops have improved to the point where I don't really want to go back to desktop computing.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Dr Mordrid]

The nForce 6150 GPU I mentioned is integrated into many laptops including some by Dell and HP. I'd bet similarly equipped ATI integrated graphics also have H.264 acceleration, but I didn't look.

Lemme check & get back.

Update:

ATI has come out with an ATI Mobility version of their X1600 series GPU. It came out earlier this year with all the goodies including H.264 acceleration.

This one should do;

http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=1045&l1=5&l2=70&l3=0

[Jerry Jones]

Thanks!



That's something to put on my wish list.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net