Quote Originally Posted by steven619 View Post

We use Digital-Rapid's encoder cards with Streams Pro software for higher end encoding. Because it has video and audio chips that can take the pressure off your computer it can do a bit more with a bit less.
Wow, looks like the Digital Rapids cards support WM9 and Flash... last time I was looking at hardware encoders, all I could seem to find was MPEG encoding.

Right now, we have three machines that run Sorenson at least part-time (we batch encode at night, usually), but I would be interested in a hardware-assisted solution.

I'm curious if you've done any direct comparisons between, for example, Sorenson Squeeze 4.5, (which is supposed to be much faster than the earlier Sorenson versions) and the Digital Rapids hardware solutions, both in terms of encoding speed and in terms of the overall quality difference between Squeeze and Stream Pro. Also, do you have the 500 or the upper end boards? $900 for the low-end board is pretty much a no-brainer, but $2500 for the higher end board would require a little more cost justification