[MPlayer-users] 3 tv-tuner cards in one computer (burglar camera system)

[Jack]

Vladimir Mosgalin wrote:

>I know this might be not the best place to ask, but anyway: is it
>possible to plug in 3 pci tv tuner cards, capture video from them,
>encode and store it in realtime? I see no problems with encoding &
>storing, but I wonder if capturing process takes a lot of system
>resources. Something like half-resolution, 3 fps will do.
>
>Do I need cards with hardware mjpeg compression? Or any cheap avermedia
>card on bt8?? chip will do?
>  
>

I don't see any reason why a bunch of cheap bt8x8 capture cards couldn't 
do it.  Hell, at 3 fps, you could probably encode them all to mpeg-4 at 
full resolution on a VERY cheap computer.  Even 10 fps at half 
resolution wouldn't be out of the question with, say, a 1.5 ghz 
machine.  In my experience, the capturing process itself isn't very 
stressful.  You could probably have acceptable results for just a 
security camera encoding/storage system with any old junky machine you 
have lying around.  You'd probably want at least a fast P-II to hit 3 
fps from all 3 sources.

Dealing with, organizing, and storing the resulting files is a different 
animal, but I'm sure someone more creative than me could write a shell 
script to automatically deal with it.  Maybe just a cron job that 
periodically kills mencoder and restarts it with a different output file 
or something, I dunno.  Doesn't seem like it would be very hard at all, 
now that I think about it.

-lt