Linux PVR: Any software MPEG encoders for Linux?

[Brian Kelsay]

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I've already mentioned that I have a Duron 850Mhz machine with 320MB RAM,
20GB & 15GB hard drives, and a TV Tuner card (AverMedia AverTV Stereo). 
I successfully installed SuSE 9.0 Linux onto it using the free FTP
install.

Now I've been browsing Linux PVR solutions, and there seems to be one
universal "feature" in all of them: if you want to record in MPEG I/II,
your TV card must support hardware encoding.  Otherwise you're stuck with
solutions using the avifile library, and probably the Indeo codec if you
don't care for the hacked DivX ;-) codec.

Are there Linux MPEG encoders?  If so, are any of them lower in cost
than, say, the cheap VCRs at Wal-Mart (less than $50) these days?  An
850Mhz Duron converts 30 minutes of AVI video into MPEG I (VCD) video in
about three hours.
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You should really read some docs at http://www.mythtv.org and a lot of your questions will be 
answered.  They use FFMpeg to encode video streams.  They may also use FLAC.  Your Duron 850 should 
be able to handle one video stream either in live mode or record.  I found my PIII-500 was just  a 
little too slow.  Also you have more than the minimum 256MB of ram.  There are a few other projects 
for PVR like freevo, and webvcr+, but they are not as feature full.  Someone here has WebVCR+ 
running and it will probably run on lesser hardware.

I don't know about the Avermedia TV card, but the Hauppage PVR-250 and 350 cards have hardware 
encoding and so you can use a lower processor speed for your PVR box.

Brian Kelsay