> > 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.
This is simply wrong. There is no requirement to compress the video to MPEG of any variety before recording to disk. Both of my old analog cards would just dump the whole stream to the disk quite happily. It took a huge amount of space(30-100GB), but that wasn't a problem, as my intention with the card was live TV and converting VHS tapes to DVD, so I only needed to have one or two things stored on the disk at a time. I would then compress the video as a second step as well as run it through filters to clean it up and deinterlace, etc. I used a 300MHz pentium 2 or 3 to do this. Although according to this page, a 450MHz should be able to handle compressing analog into MPEG2 live. http://ati.amd.com/products/faqs/allinwonderfaq.html (See answer to question #5) I was very happy with my ATI card, and also with my old Hauppauge. Both of those could be had for cheap these days. They wouldn't handle digital TV at all, but could do the input from your playstation without breaking a sweat. In fact if you're not saving the video but just viewing it my experience is that it doesn't take much CPU power at all. The ATI, since it's also the system's video card, didn't hardly touch the rest of the system if you were just watching video full screen. The Hauppauge WinTV-Go that I had also had needed extremely low system resources. (well, I still have it, just not in my computer hooked to the cable, and I'm still happy with it.) I think it used DMA or something like that to dump the stream directly to the video card. In fact looking at the specs, they recommend a 90MHz minimum. That's ridiculously low power compared to anything remotely modern. http://registration.hauppauge.com/webstore/specialofferforintelintegrators.asp So there are options. Again, Hauppauge is very well known for having at least some of their cards being wonderful under Linux. I don't know if that holds for their whole line or not. If you mainly want to just play your playstation through the computer screen you can get one of these off Ebay for $15 shipped to your door. Erik _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
