i'm just confused between the two, but as i understand both of them are the same. so if the DVR or sofware specs say it has/capable of mpeg4 compression does it also means it has a mpeg4 encoder?


Thanks

Yes. Your right.

Encoders for video are needed whether hardware or software based.

There are several types of Mpeg4 encoding methods though.

Hope this helps.

They can be the same but not always, some use hardware to encode mpeg 1 or 2 and then use software to transcode it to mpeg 4. Few are doing 100% hardware mpeg4 encoding.