“CyberLink Corp., a leading developer in providing integrated solutions for the Digital Home, announced the development of an MPEG-2 software encoder plug-in for the Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (MCE) and its upcoming Update Rollup 2 version. This plug-in drastically reduces costs for tuner card manufacturers by avoiding reliance on hardware chipsets when recording TV content with MPEG-2 video and audio quality.
The major trend in the consumer PC market is the ability to record live TV content. Previously, TV tuner cards utilized hardware encoding due to insufficient chipset speed and computing power, which curtailed demand and lowered margins for manufacturers and system integrators. However, CyberLink has developed an alternative and cost-effective solution for hardware manufacturers and system integrators the MPEG-2 video and audio software encoder plug-in for Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. This software solution drastically reduces the dependency on costly hardware encoding chipsets.
As computing power increases, reliance on powerful, quality, but yet inexpensive software applications and encoders - such as CyberLink's MPEG-2 encoding solution - will exponentially increase," said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink. "CyberLink's expertise and specialization in digital video software technology puts us at the forefront of digital TV recording and playback technology, ensuring our OEM partners have the most cost-effective yet quality solutions for adapting to the industry's current and foreseeable demands. End users will also greatly benefit from the superb reliability and performance of CyberLink's MPEG-2 software encoder."
It will be interesting to see how well Cyberlink’s encoder actually works in practice and what their minimum system requirements are. Pricing on this will be an interesting angle. If you buy a TV card for ~£40; and then buy this encoder which will probably be in the £10-20 range (I'd expect, price TBA) …you are approaching the cost of a Hauppauge WinTV PVR150 hardware encoder card. Personally I would consider the £10-20 extra for a hardware encoder money well spent, but I can see why this would be attractive to system builders. Particularly so if you could reasonable handle dual tuners (since it defiantly would be cheaper than a hardware solution).