[Coco] Re: Help - There that got your attention.

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Gene Heskett may have mentioned these words:

[snippage]

>Those Sempron 1.6ghz boxes will be short
>in the encoding to mpg thruput dept by quite a bit.

Yea, altho if you clustered 2 of 'em, you might get close, depending on 
resolution & whatnot.

I can encode in realtime on my Dual Athlon MP 2600+ box if I use a quickie 
(read: crappy video quality) encoder at VCD resolution (352x240[ish] - I 
don't do VCD. I do SVCD, which is 480x480) which is what I've transcoded 
for years off of my TiVo.

However, I don't like quickie stuff; I go more for the best quality I can 
get, so I have very little experience in doing stuff realtime - but if it's 
not quality you want, I could prolly figure it out. I do all my MPEG 
schtuff on Winders yet, tho...

>   Your only route to
>success is a video capture card with a hardware mpg encoder on it, and
>AFAIK, no Happauge card has that.

Then you'd be wrong... The Hauppauge WinTV PCI 250 has MPEG encoding 
onboard, but decoding has to be done on the host processor. The WinTV PCI 
350 has MPEG encoding and decoding, and you can build a TiVo out of a 
200Mhz box *easily* as the CPU just plays "traffic cop."

Drummed up from a google search is this forum:

http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/board/forumdisplay.php?f=13

which looks like a good source of info, tho I didn't specifically search 
for Linux geeks on that site. If you search for people running MythTV with 
one of these cards, you might drum up quite a bit'o'info as well.

I have a 250, but I don't have a spare machine (yet) I can dedicate to a 
replacement TiVo. It uses the BTTV driver in linux, IIRC.

Granted, these cards are a wee bit more expensive (street price for the 250 
is about $130ish, and street for the 350 is around $170+ last I checked) 
but Hauppauge definitely has hardware encoding & decoding on some of their 
cards.

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | Anarchy doesn't scale well. -- Me
zmerch at 30below.com.         |
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers