Erik Lane wrote: >> 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 > > Good catch Erik,
I didn't realize that these cards had that low of system requirements for passing the stream to the video card. It looks like there are a few solutions for Michael's P3, after all! I vaguely remember looking at them when I put together my first PVR, and decided to go with the Hauppauge PVR150's, since they had the mpeg encoders on the card, which is what I wanted. I was at the freegeek thriftstore a couple of weeks ago, and they had a few of these in the bins. So, one could probably pick one up there for cheap, and not have to wait for shipping. - Jim _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
