Talk:Hardware vs software encoders

I do not believe this is entirely correct.

• Only cx23415 has hardware encoder _and_ decoder.

• cx23416 has hardware encoder _only_.

• The way cards like Connexant blackbird are able to provide raw video is that they can export the data _before_ it is being feed to encoder (article claims it is being decoded).

• You can export raw data from ivtv cards using HM12 format (see README.hm12 in linux kernel > 2.6.19). However it is cumbersome and tricky to do so. (it is entirely possible that this raw format was just as debugging feature).

• The only card that I know of that uses cx23415 is Hauppauge PVR-350. In this card you should be able to access a) raw data via hm12 (I immagine), b) mpeg stream, and c) feed data to mpeg decoder (but output is usually screen, not sure if you can redirect it back to file).