Leadtek has an interesting new product, the PxVC1100 MPEG-2/H.264 Transcoding card based around the Toshiba SpursEngine BXA32110 chipset.  It is designed specifically to provide Inter-transcoding between H.264 and MPEG-2 and up-convert SD/DVD video to HD like quality.  Legit Reviews testing showed a 50% speed increase in DVD transcoding and a noticeable difference in video quality and file size.  They do have a warning of an incompatibility with the new Intel P55 and X58 chipsets.  You must use the PCIe slot that who’s lanes are controlled by the ICH10.

“Compared to even the latest CPU and Graphics hardware, the Spurs Engine held its own. Though testing different encoding/transcoding types and programs can be quite a headache, it’s easy to see that the Leadtek WinFast PxVC1100 is an MPEG-2/H.264 transcoding card can benefit those who do large amounts of this type of work. While there are only a couple of different formats to be used, they process very quickly and have outstanding quality. I have seen a lot of questions about taking SD quality video and converting to an HD format and most are answered with “don’t waste your time because it will be the same quality.” Well with the Spurs Engine, that answer can be thrown out. While taking SD quality video and reaching the quality of an original HD source would be impossible, the content was very clearly much higher quality than the source. Best of all was that this process was quick, encoding at about 20% faster than real time playback…”

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