On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Some poser wrote:
> Jim, you post enough crap from Slashdot to know differently. People are
> doing it. I have a whitebox machine (AMD, 256M ram, cheap TV card, 20G
> disk, $300 a year ago) that does it. It isn't a big deal.
Speaking of posting crap...and don't send me private email.
Which is irrelevant, what is the CPU speed of the box? -THAT- is what is
important...raw processing power. An old 486dx/80 running Linux will store
video but only at a handfull of fps.
In any real world system not only are you going to pull the raw data off
the tv card (30fps@4Mb/frame@60s~=.7G for 1m of video) but also use a
codec to compress it. Then you've also got to move the bits onto the hard
drive. All without throwing any interrupts that will cause a dropped
frame or cause a codec problem. And don't forget that's at the default
television resolution (which is less than 640x480). If you want to scale
it up to 1024*768 you've got a lot of interpollating to throw in there as
well. And then if you want HDTV or Widescreen (Firefly in widescreen is
awesome!) you've got an even heavier load.
This lets you put roughly 45m of video (along with the audio) on a
standard 600M CD-R (and if you want to burn the CD-R or watch the stream
at the same time you're encoding it while you surf the net and handle
email and run your firewall... you can increase the cpu requirements
considerably).
There -is- a big deal and it went right over your head. Just any old cheap
box will -not- do video -effectively-. Then again, maybe you like watching
320x200.
You should have tried this back in the late 80's with a single frame VHS
recorder and an Amiga Video Toaster...one frame at a time, thank god for
AREXX ;)
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Anais Nin www.open-forge.org
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