3DHardware.net verblijdt ons met een review van de multi functionele Matrox Marvel G400-TV video-editing kaart. Hier een stukje over de hardware MJPEG encoder:
The feature that made the Marvel G200 shine was the hardware MJPEG encoder included on the Marvel G200 graphics card. Having a hardware solution instead of a software based MPEG/2 encoder means that there's much less CPU workload involved when capturing video and that a higher image quality can be obtained. As it proved to be a great success on the Marvel G200 Matrox decided to have the same feature on the Marvel G400-TV as well. The pros about hardware MJPEG are easy to see, it offers great quality, no drop in frames and low CPU requirements. This means that you can use the Marvel G400-TV on a slower CPU without having to sacrifise image quality and frame rates, something that isn't really possible with cards using software MPEG2 video capture (ATi All-In-Wonder 128, 3dfx Voodoo3 3500-TV) as they require a much more powerful CPU. The downside of hardware MJPEG is that the captured video is very large (albeit smaller than 100% uncompressed). This can prove to be a problem for those that do not have immense amounts of storage space and considering the fact that most of us don't have 60GB storage available many will have a few problems actually finding place to store the captured video. There are of course many different options to choose when capturing video, resolution, MJPEG compression rate and frame rate. Choosing a lower resolution and a high compression have save valuable space in exchange for a loss of image quality.
