Hi all,

Just a quick question. I would like to find a reasonably priced H264 hardware encoder card to compress my edited source files into the Quicktime format. I DO NOT need a card with multiple video inputs and live realtime encoding capabilities. Just something that will take my final DV Type 2 files and spin them out as 800 x 600 .mov files. It should output the files much faster than either of the 2 software encoders I have available and that would be nice.

Initially I considered one of the USB devices for this purpose but 640 x 480 was the maximum output resolutiuon and that's 1 notch below what I need. Most of my clients run their monitors at 1024 x 768 and the quality of an 800 x 600 mov file still  looks great when played full screen in my player. Any comments will be appreciated.

Regards - Jim

ps: Michael, thanks for the push in the right direction. I'd forgotten all about an ATI TV Wonder I had laying around from about 5 years ago. It made importing from a composite source a snap.