For hardware encoding, look at these:
Digital Rapids
http://www.digital-rapids.com/Products/IndividualProducts.aspx
Envivo
http://www.envivio.com/
Visionary Solutions, Inc.
http://www.vsicam.com/
Telestream
http://www.telestream.net/pipeline/overview.htm
Matrox
http://www.matrox.com/video/en/solutions/encoding/
My brain gets foggy looking at all the various options and weird names for the various hardware solutions. I know some people that use Digital Rapids stuff and it just plain works, is easy to configure, comes with software, and is pretty affordable considering what it does.
Many on the list tout Telestream, and I know a lot of TV stations use it in various configurations. I've read good things about Visionary Solutions and they have a slew of products, but their pricing and configurations are confusing.
The Matrox solutions require 3rd party software from what I've read, so you'd need Telestream Episode or Apple Compressor or others to get the hardware accelerated benefits of it. I don't believe it has direct input of video/audio either, but is an accelerator card.
There are probably other products too, but these are the ones that come up the most when in real-time encoding discussions.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
www.videomi.com
