@peroxidechicken
For 'Windows XP Media Center' targeted market, ATI DX9 class "ALL-In-Wonder" cards may do the trick. For NV camp, NVIDIA’s VIVO DX9** class cards may also do the trick. Leadtek (illustrated as an example) usually bundles Ulead Video Studio 6 or 7 (OEM edition) with their cards. One could take a look at Matrox’s based solutions if you’re serious about video transfers(as Takemehomegrandma menstioned earlier).
**Unlike DX9 class cards, NV DX8 class cards VIVO functions are dependant on off-chip VIVO codecs(e.g. Philip 7108) (i.e. not integrated to GPU), thus their quality can vary.
For software based MPEG2 encoding at TV resolutions; 266FSB (no KT133A stuff) Athlon TBird @ 1.33Ghz would be a minimum(my POV) (I still got away with real time encoding with @1.133Ghz Athlon TBird with KT133A chipset, but it’s bordering in dropping encoding frames rates). A hard disk that can do ~40MB/s in Neroburn’s benchmarks should be sufficient. With 266FSB (with Kt266A/nForce1 chipsets), Mepg2(DVD ;-) ) to DIVX (Flask) encoding the performance almost instantly doubles relative to KT133A.
PS;I have several Athlon XP/VIA KT6xx/nForce2(limited to ASUS and Gigabyte only) boxes for testing...
