As a rule, I dislike most external encoders. But after reading up on this one from Inventa, I might be willing to give external another shot…

INVENTA Australia has released a high-quality USB-powered realtime hardware MPEG2/1 video encoder USBMPEG2-Box, which can be used in various video archiving and DVD creation applications.

Built on high-quality Conexant and Philips chipsets, USBMPEG2-Box processes MPEG video/audio encoding entirely on-board that will not be affected by the host PC’s hardware - therefore slow or faster PCs, laptops or desktops will all achieve the same high-quality video and audio recording. [Read the rest]