It seems I've lost some text on my precedent post in consequence of an electric energy blackout experienced during editing.
Last comment I have to add before concluding is that sometimes deluding experiences are originated from an unlucky approach to things and more often from the human attitude to expect that new situations are necessarily to be handled on the base of the precedent experiences accumulated in the past. Sometimes may happen that the old experiences aren't enough and/or even leading astray. So the new situations are felt difficult to handle even if they really are not. Again, there isn't one Linux, there are hundreds. They are all different and the real and sole problem is to get the one fitting one's needs. There are three or four operating systems called Windows and this makes things easier to the user causing this o.s. to be more an all-around product. At the same time this is in some cases a concern. Generally, this characteristic of being "all-around" exist at the expense of some other characteristics. One further example of this is the relevant performance difference between WinXP and Vista or between a Linux kernel based o.s. with Xwindow and the same with KDE v4 with Beryl & C.. But all this is matter of a possible other thread really not interesting for this forum. jr_dakota describes a typical setup and requirements list related to activities mostly insisting on the real bottlenecks of our PC hardware architectures, speed in HD and graphic transactions. This kind of processing tasks are particularly intensive for the PC hardware. Not so can be said about transcoding, that can't be compared to SDR or DSP cause a different algorithm complexity in relation to the mathematical processing capacity of the PC hardware. So, basically, both Windows and Linux based o.s. are able to develop about the same processing power with some differences depending on the major mandatory processing tasks they have to crunch all the time. Windows, as more all-arounder, must give often priority to tasks related to graphical processing, and uses a "memory management scheme" that often requires the slow HD accesses at the expenses of other pending tasks. If the application doesn't change this behavior (and the programmer must be one with real nuts to create such a program!) the hard coded internal tasks and memory management do prefer to advantage the graphic processes (to give the user a feeling/illusion of speed). Due to the fact Linux based o.s. are more specialized (read "poor all-arounder"), things can flow very quick if the o.s. is tailored for the activity required by the user, and very slow if the user requests activities for which the o.s. flavor isn't specialized for. Adaptation of a Linux o.s. to efficient specific task and memory management schemes is not very difficult and can be often changed by medium-advanced users without touching the running application. Treating a Linux o.s. as an all-arounder like Windows o.s. are, is a common mistake. A mistake mostly based on the not so clear documented fact that Linux kernel based o.s. are significantly different systems and not only in their outlook. Video transcoding processes require specific resources (different from the SDR and DSP one's!). So, to have a Linux system working with this particular kind of tasks, a specific tailored Linux distribution has to be adopted. Or, as evolved-users, we have to apply specific setup schemes to ensure a correct and efficient processing of transcoding. The same applies e.g. to SDR and DSP oriented applications. I'd like to say a last thing on this topic. I agree with Alberto's evaluation of the performances of Vista against WinXP due to some tests I've made yesterday. Vista isn't a new operating system, it is a WinXP evolution, where the most process power consuming tasks are actually the Graphic User Interface routines (behind others). Obtaining all that effects steals great amounts of CPU processing power, obviously subtracted to all other (system and application) tasks. Maybe the processing power budget can be refined by the Microsoft guys in a near future, but my personal opinion is that to achieve an equilibrated situation (actually it is not!) many things have to be changed in the o.s. engine. On the other side I suppose this new o.s. releases are made looking at the near future developments in the hardware sector as to satisfy the users using the actual hardware architectures. New more powerful graphic cards as mother boards with more multiprocessors (8 seems to be the near next step) and new DDR memories will satisfy the processing power of Vista and its successor (already on development progress). This are good news either for regular users as for specialized ones as we are with our processing intensive applications like SDR and DSP are. In the meanwhile, using the hardware we have now!, WinXP seems to better satisfy the SDR/DSP needs as Vista can do. Seen from this point of view, what Alberto is saying makes really sense, isn't it? vy 73s de Andreas - ik2wqi
