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Hardware MPEG2 TV Tuners Compared
EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has put together an intriguing comparison of TV tuner cards with hardware MPEG2 acceleration from ATI, eVGA, and Hauppauge. The article examines CPU utilization for typical PVR tasks and highlights some very apparent image quality differences between the three cards. Testing was apparently done with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, but does anyone have experience with the cards in MythTV?"
Hardware MPEG/4 cards do exist. Plextor has their pxtv line which can do MPEG/4 capture and has recently released Linux drivers.
It's just unfortunate that these cards don't also support DV compression. MPEG is nice and all but sometimes when capturing from a camcorder or vhs, you want to edit the resulting video. MPEG is not ideal for this. Granted, DV capture devices do exist but none to my knowledge have a tuner.
The Lion King, like all standard animations, uses large swaths of relatively flat color punctuated by dark linework. Optimal compression for line art is substantially different from that of highly-shaded photographic imagery. Given that the vast majority of video available on TV is real-world, that test case seems like a poor indicator for typical performance.