Larry Brigman wrote: > On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 7:02 PM, Michael Robinson > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Stupid question, why do you need a gigahertz or better computer >> to run a tuner card that simply allows you to display the play >> station II's analog low definition output on your screen? The >> play station II, if I'm not mistaken, is only a 300 mhz computer. >> I can possibly upgrade my 450 mhz PIII to 750 mhz, but that's >> the cheapest thing I can do. >> >> > > It isn't the playback that consumes the CPU it is recording analog to disk. > It has to encode it to MPEG2 before it sticks it on the disk. It > takes at about a 1GHZ > machine to encode a single TV stream to MPEG in real-time. To do more than > one > turner, more GHZ . > > That is why a premium is paid for cards that have hardware encoders on them. > > Digital TV is a different story. It is broadcast in a MPEG2 transport > stream that > can be saved directly to disk. No encoding to worry about. > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > > To expand on Larry's explanation, your PC has to convert the incoming analog signal from your Playstation to a compatible digital signal the PC understands, and then pipe it through your video card, before it can be displayed on your monitor. This is expensive processor-wise if an encoder is not built onto the capture card. And, if the card has an encoder to lighten the load on your processor, then you suffer the delay while it is written to disk. This would likely make your Playstation games unplayable.
I forgot all about FreeGeek's volunteer program. Thanks for bringing it up, Larry. As cash to spend is an issue, you can indeed volunteer to build PC's for FreeGeek. After you have built a certain number of PC's using recycled parts (5-6 IIRC), you get to build one for yourself (and, within reason, I think that they allow you your pick of the available hardware). Who knows, you might even score a video capture card as part of the deal, too! If I remember the stats on what they classify as recyclable hardware correctly, one of these systems is almost guaranteed to be capable of handling your wants, and needs. Speaking specifically to the Playstation / PC processor differences: There are chips in the playstation that are designed to do specific tasks that are unique to the Playstation's function. These tasks bypass the Playstation processor altogether, so it does not need its CPU to do any work for the tasks the chips perform. A PC is not going to have these special chips in it, due to the generic nature of the design, so it has to emulate those tasks in software, which takes a lot more CPU horsepower. -Jim _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
