Hardware H.264 encoder useful or not?

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Sidicas
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Dec 31, 2012 7:31 am

Hardware H.264 encoder useful or not?

Post by Sidicas »

Hello,

I saw that some DVR cards have processors in them to encode video to H.264 automatically. Is this really useful at all or not? If I set zoneminder to record, is it just going to take that H.264 encoded video and re-encode it to MPEG-2 for saving to the disk? Or is it possible for Zoneminder to use the H.264 video from the capture card and then just save it directly to the disk without encoding when doing recording, and perhaps saving a ton of CPU usage in the process?

The card I'm looking at getting is capable of hardware encoding 4 streams of D1/4CIF quality simulateously, by using a couple of TI TMS320DM64X chips.

Thanks for any advice.
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