Re:I'm rarely impressed... (Score 1)

Based on the article, the quality of encodes is likely to be poor - it sounds like they left out some important parts of the encode process like B frames and decent re-sizing. Leaving out things like B frames (I think they also mentioned leaving out 1/4 pixel motion estimation) will hurt bit efficiency. Using cheap resizing will also somewhat hurt bit eficiency (by turning smooth features into jagged ones, that then need more bits on a frame by frame basis to encode), but will also just introduce artifacts that look bad. Also, it sounded like the output size was determined in part by the encode profile - and one of the fastest ways of speeding up encode is to do a quick (read as not very high quality) resize of the original to a smaller frame size and then encode. So - hard to tell if the 5x is even slightly an apples to apples comparison! BUT - If the quality isn't too bad, the plus of this card might eventually be to allow the use of multiple cards withing a single box to allow N simultaneous encodings to occur.