How much faster will hardware mpeg encoding be???

[phynicle]

How much faster will hardware mpeg encoding be as opposed to using the latest athlon or the fastest p4 to do the job???

[Fruitfrenzy]

Speed isn't the only issue. A hardware encoder should be able to encode video in real time and it is possible that high end cpus can do the same.

The main difference is likely to be the quality of the encoded video. It is possible to encode valid mpeg streams with very little effort but the end results will look terrible. The more effort that you put into motion estimation the better the end result will look.

Motion estimation is very time consuming in software but a hardware implementation can do it very quickly.

If realtime encoding is not an issue then the software decoder may well be able to do a more thorough job by taking as long as is required to do it.