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1. CPU-bound encoding/transcoding -- where multi-cores are handy, but
neither memory, disks nor graphics are bottlenecks

2. Visual editing, needing fast scrolling back and forth -- where
hardware offloading of video decoding may or may not be handy
(depending on whether hardware offloading only supports streaming) and
may or may not be exploited by editing or driver software {sigh}.  I
imagine fast reading from disks would also be handy for this.

I suspect these requirements may be pointing to separate (and possibly
dedicated) hardware for each job.  I've no principled objection to
going that way, but will struggle to identify or evaluate dedicated
hardware 'solutions'.

I've quickly browsed around the odd bit of 'pro' video hardware and
been completely bamboozled by descriptions which range from
hand-waving marketing tosh to terse bullet points which probably don't
make sense even to most industry insiders ... nothing in between these
two extremes.

Thus far, I've surmised that 'pro' transcoding hardware assumes that
you are streaming the input to the transcoder via something like HDMI
(digital) or S-video/composite (analogue) ... rather than simply
reading it off a hard disk. Again, I've no principled objection to
doing this ... but:

1. I have no idea about the current state of TV/Video-OUT under Linux.
Last time I looked (many years ago) only a handful of graphics cards
and driver combinations could do it at all.

2. I'm guessing that a generic PC with a poky multi-core CPU would be
good enough for my transcoding needs -- although I'd prefer *not* to
do transcoding on my everyday desktop machine.

3. I'd ideally prefer something that worked like the Elgato Turbo.264
HD - H.264 Encoder for Macs purports to  -- i.e. offloads to
peripheral hardware, which connects via USB and lets you simply 'drop'
files on it to  transcode. See
http://www.elgato.com/elgato/int/mainmenu/products/Accessories/Turbo264HD/product1.en.html

The 'pro' hardware transcoders mentioned above also seem to assume the
source of the input stream is some sort of editing 'deck'.

Although I am sceptical about the need for hardware that seems to
provide little more than a jog-shuttle wheel, some sliders, and an
esoteric keyboard ... I'd be happy to use one, if that were the price
for having a decent hardware-software bundle to do the cutting,
splicing and syching stuff.

On the other hand, my limited experience of windows-based film
industry editing suites was quite simply appalling. The fancy decks
were nice, but the juddering snail's-pace progression towards the next
inevitable reboot, was baldness-enducing.

So here are my follow-up questions:

1. Have I read Paul and James correctly? -- i.e. can most transcoding
probably be handled by a sufficiently poky multi-core CPU?

2. Does anyone know of something like the Elgato encoder which works
under Linux?

3. Can anyone suggest editing software, or a hardware-software bundle,
that can solve the problem of scrolling back and forth through very
large MPEG-2 files, especially MPEG-2 transport streams?

Dave

P.S. I have a couple of Macs, so I'll probably try out the Elgato USB
encoders, but I hate the OSX GUI, so even if it really works, I'll be
looking for something better on Linux.