I don't want to be a pessimist, but at least in Elgato's case, h.264 may cause more problems than it solves. For example, h.264 is great for all-around picture quality from 640x480 to 1920x1080, but the processor requirement to play these videos will knock out most of their users with anything less than a G5. Hardware encoding may be good to save disk space but displaying h.264 does not have hardware acceleration YET.
I have a EyeTV 500 (HDTV) and as we speak I am converting a boatload of Malcolm in the Middle episodes to h.264. It takes about a day so save 2 videos on my Dual 2Ghz G5. (Oh, how I long for a Quad... ) This stage is where I see most of the benefits from hardware acceleration, not immediately after the file is captured in the native MPEG2 format. Although it makes large files, I prefer to set my own bit rate/size after the program is on my drive rather than before.
On analog TV, h.264 will save space, but many computers (G3's and G4's) would give up the ghost trying to crunch h.264 files.
I think thats a poor excuse to not offer encoder support. H.264 is the future and analog tuners dont do HD. If they added this support to the eyetv 200, its value would be greatly increased.
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I have a EyeTV 500 (HDTV) and as we speak I am converting a boatload of Malcolm in the Middle episodes to h.264. It takes about a day so save 2 videos on my Dual 2Ghz G5. (Oh, how I long for a Quad...
On analog TV, h.264 will save space, but many computers (G3's and G4's) would give up the ghost trying to crunch h.264 files.
Originally posted by addabox
Does Altivec get leveraged for this kind of thing?
Yes. In Intel's case, Apple would heavily use SSE3 for this.