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What do you give up when you go the $100 or $1000 route, as compared to real-time MPEG encoders that cost $8000 to $40,000, or even $75,000 for SonY's RTE-3000B?
The surprising answer is, "Not as much as you might think." Even if you've got the 75 grand, it's still tempting to take a furtive look at the systems that even an average Joe can afford. Giving in to that temptation means taking a gander at six MPEG-1 encoders that cost under $1000. To be fair, four of the products are softwareonly encoders that require a separate capture card, but if you've already got the card, the incremental cost can start at $89. Products in this category include CeQuadrat's PixelShrink ($199), Ulead's MPEG Converter ($249), Vitec's MPEG Maker ($125) and Xing Technologies' XingMPEG Encoder ($89).
While these software options have been around for a while, only recently have the wraps been taken off two brand new hardware encoders bound to make waves in their respective categories. Darim's MPEGator may have a name that's tough to swallow, but the price goes down real easy. This $995 real-time MPEG-1 encoder costs literally 12 percent of the price of its nearest competitor, FutureTel's Prime View II. And Data Translation thinks their $995 two-pass hardware encoder, Broadway, is just the ticket for CD-ROM title developers hoping to hit the big screen. Whether Broadway's price will motivate title developers to create MPEG titles, as Data Translation claims, is hard to answer, but Broadway, and the rest of the low-cost MPEG-1 encoder products, sure take the sticker shock away from MPEG encoding.
In spite of this relative rash of low-cost choices, users should still keep some important distinctions in mind. Software-only encoders, for instance, use previously digitized video to spit out MPEG-1-encoded files. Xing Technologies created this category in 1994 with XingCD, a breakthrough product introduced at $995 at a time when the next cheapest MPEG-1 encoder cost about $20,000. But cheap, software-based encoders remain extremely slow, with some products taking as long as 60 minutes to encode one minute of MPEG video on a Pentium 133.
Data Translation's Broadway is a two-pass encoder that first captures video to hard drive in a format called "editable MPEG," which is comprised solely...